Small Talk
by Pat Foley
Summary: All the knowledge in the world sometimes doesn't bring understanding. Holo series 0. Sarek/Amanda, and a seven year old Spock at times bent on destruction. Complete
1. Chapter 1

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 1**

Even in the 23rd century, when we had already discovered so many intelligent thriving alien civilizations, for humans to still that believe their own species was the first, the best, the most advanced one in the universe was a popular myth. And its corollary was that the human-centric Federation was the guiding light bringing civilization to the rest of the unwashed savages in the known galaxy.

That this belief was regarded by many non-human species with understandable incredulity, not to say full-out knee slapping hilarity – for those who actually had knees -- didn't deter by one iota the majority of humans who believed it to be the undisputed truth, the word on high, with all the fervency of a novice nun.

When I niggled Sarek about it one day, curious to know his opinion of those lower level diplomatic attaches who still sometimes dealt with Vulcans as if they were not quite …well, human… though honestly the upper level Federation administration did behave better – he tactfully allowed that he found human naiveté and belief in their own inherent self-worth at times charming. That's diplomacy for you. Of course, we hadn't been married long. He was more polite…ummm, less candid… then.

Before I met Sarek, I won my first Zi -- Magni, to those who know little and could care less about these obscure academic awards-- by turning that popular and inaccurate academic theory on its head. Though the popular view is still quite prevalent.

Not that I purported that humans were actually any **worse** than most other species in our abilities and views. I never claimed that. In fact, finding the commonality among us all was my stock in trade in an atmosphere that up till then had concentrated mostly on the differences between species. I simply pointed out all the ways in which we had a lot more in common than popular – and scientific – opinion erroneously allowed.

I also drew the comparison between the current, mistaken Terran view that humans had a universal lock on certain ethical and sociological precepts with the long ago indisputably held twentieth century belief that humans were the only creatures on Terra to use tools, create language, and think.

That ancient erroneous but dearly cherished precept, which had been so painful and ruined so many reputations when it was proven untrue to the former scientific community three centuries ago, blew up like a neutron bomb …well, ruffled more than a few feathers… when I drew the analogy. And not among the avian species in the Federation, but here among my colleagues at home. In fact, it set off a firestorm of controversy, finger pointing and blame.

But it had to come. While an unpretty conceit in the twentieth century, that attitude was far less estimable in the 23rd, when we had even more evidence that it was untrue. But that it was rapidly crumbling under the light of new discoveries even before I poked fatal holes in it didn't make its downfall any less unpleasant, heretical, or painful to those who still tried so stridently to uphold it.

Heads fell, reputations built on the supremacy of humans were trashed, and my doctoral thesis won me my first Zi. Not to mention the eternal enmity of some of my peers, But that's academia.

I followed up my thesis with a simplified version in a mass market monograph that, because many humans were zoo-curious about aliens in the newly expanding Federation, inexplicably turned into a wildly popular bestseller. And not just among humans. You rarely see a Harvard press book rack up sales on Tellur, Rigel, Andor and even Vulcan, but mine did. You see, up until then, virtually all scientists studying alien civilizations had concentrated on their differences as regard humans. No one had concentrated on defining shared truths, beliefs and characteristics.

I won't say it made everyone in the Federation hold hands – well whatever appendages they possessed -- and join in a chorus of Koom-bah-ya. But it was as if it suddenly reduced the heat in a very intense pressure-cooker.

The Nobel committee, who had a longstanding leaning toward mavericks, and a liberal attitude toward potential peace-keeping factors, liked the book too. That it wasn't a popular view among Terrans in my own field of ethology, or ethosociology, who'd made their reputations purporting largely opposite views, didn't endear me to my own peers. But they weren't on the awards committee. I won the Nobel after I met Sarek, but well before he proposed.

That I started off very young with a Zi and a Nobel made me even less well regarded by colleagues in my field. But my theories were useful in the Federation diplomatic community, who were often struggling to find some common ground with the new aliens in the Federation. It did give everyone a chance to take a break from fighting. Even if they couldn't agree who held title to what section of space, they could agree on some of these precepts. It gave them something to converse companionably about at a diplomatic reception. **Then** they went into the conference room and started slugging it out again.

Hey, it was only a book, not Surak's Peace Precepts.

The fury over my Nobel nomination was perhaps one of the things that first drew Sarek's notice to a new and otherwise obscure human researcher.

Though I earned my first awards before I met Sarek, it took me much longer to earn the next ones, in spite of the fact that traveling with my husband and going on his various diplomatic junkets gave me more field research than **anyone**, including I, could want. All of which I shamelessly exploited.

I didn't marry him for the free field experience, as some colleagues cattily supposed. No more than he married me for free analysis, which they also snarkily construed. In fact, his constant diplomatic traveling was a headache to my academic schedule. Teaching by subspace relay only sounds glamorous. It's not as bad as shouting down a well, or conversing with two tin cans and a string several light-years' long. But it leaves a lot to be desired.

But nothing beats living almost full time in a truly alien society to get the real impact of how little the doings of human beings mean to the majority of Federation aliens. That was probably the single greatest benefit I obtained – academically that is -- from my marriage.

Still in spite of all this free academic fodder, getting married, adjusting to marriage to a Vulcan, moving off planet, teaching at the VSA, having a baby, all take their toll on one's career. It took me another seven years – how mythical that number – to earn a second Zi.

That too was partially politically driven – a long treatise comparing the hereditary meritocracies of Helios warrior hives, Tellurian, Andorian and Rigillian political systems, and Federation corporate military-industrial and political nepotism -- with the tendencies driving and restricting aggression in these long standing systems.

Anything that looked like it might prevent a war tended to catch the eye of the Nobel committee, but I this time was only a nominee. A newer and even more radical prospect beat me out for the actual prize, much to Sarek and Spock's suppressed but real indignation. Sarek didn't have the time to develop any real understanding of the respective merits of either one of our papers. He had only an amateur's knowledge of my field to begin with, much as I did with his. But I think he was a bit shocked that a member of his clan might be up for an award and not actually win it. See? I told him it was that Vulcan meritocracy clan mentality kicking in. But I don't think he was appeased by the insight.

Even though in that go-round I was a Nobel 'loser', so to speak, as my mortified son characterized it, (secretly I believe he thought that if I were Vulcan, I would of course have won), the second Zi was prestigious enough that I still got quite a few requests to deliver conference keynotes. One on nearby Rigel, for my own professional society, I was tempted to accept.

With a small child and a widely traveled husband, I found I hungered for the gatherings of my own professional clan – an appetite I suspected would soon be more than satisfied after the first day or two of conference meetings in the ballrooms highlighted by academic back-biting in the corridors. But I still wanted to go. Spock was no preschool baby any more. Sarek would be home to hold the fort -- or Fortress as the case may be – and baby-sit. And I found a starship connection that would have me on Rigel and back in five days. It was too good a deal to miss. And after so many years of married life, I was looking forward to being entirely on my own for a few days, sans family attachments.

Marrying a Vulcan is all very well, at least at times. But after you are married, after you have a child, well, then you **have** them. At first all that bonding and Vulcan togetherness is novel and quite nice from a human female perspective. At least, he's not the average human male who spends the weekends watching spaceball tournaments and asking you to fetch him a beer, and while you're at it, please stop walking in front of the viewscreen during the big play. And far from leaving you stuck at home with the baby while he goes off to exotic destinations like Babel (yeah, right) a Vulcan husband actually **wants** you to go with him. Flattering, no? The stuff of romance novels.

You poor child. You're wrong, wrong, wrong.

At first it is flattering. It's only after the first few years that you are seized with an intense desire to hide the diplomatic packets in a flower pot in the garden after the Federation courier leaves. The desire fades, because you know that the Federation Undersecretary knows where you live and he **will** hunt you down if you try it. And **then** you'll have to explain to your oh-so-logical husband why his business correspondence is planted out there in the sand with the plomeek.

So you can understand why after a few years of this sort of togetherness, the idea of a few days sans husband and child – even at a snarky academic conference -- can sound more thrilling than **any** exotic Federation destination. It doesn't matter that you know long before the conference ends, you'll be sick of academic politics and its backbiting knife-wielding and **more** than willing to go home. Even if it means dealing with Federation politics and **their** backbiting knife-wielding.

You just want that all important change.

Actually I think I begin to understand why my husband thinks I'm illogical.

Change of **scene**, anyway.

However limited the change, I was determined to go. That my going alone was untraditional, by Vulcan standards, I was blithely prepared to ignore. I was a woman, a human woman, not a mouse. I was prepared to beard the Vulcan in his den.

Sarek was a bit taken aback when I mentioned – not asked -- that I was going.

He didn't quite lose his countenance. But he sat back from his work to stare at me across his office desk, brows raised. "You mean to travel alone? Quite alone?" He acted as if I was waltzing off to Shangri-La for the next eternity, without Sherpa guides to carry me over those treacherous mountain passes.

"I can board a starship without a Vulcan tour guide, you know," I teased him. "Anyway, why shouldn't I?"

He looked at me as if he was trying very hard to think of a logical reason, and one was stubbornly not appearing.

"Rigel's **so** close to Vulcan. And for once, there's nothing much going on in the Federation front. I'll be back home before you'll even notice I'm gone."

"I will notice," he said gravely, looking at me as if I had lost my mind, or thought he had, to suggest such a separation. "I will **very** much notice."

There, you see? Half the women I know would have crumbled at this point. But I was made of sterner stuff. No Minnie Mouse here.

"It will give you and Spock time for a little father/son bonding. Not in the telepathic sense," I amended, when he raised a brow and drew a breath to expostulate. "Just have time to spend together without me."

"Why would we want that?" Sarek asked, his forehead creasing in puzzlement.

By now, the violins should have been in full chorus, accompanied by a snowfall of rose petals, and most human women would be at his feet sobbing out their eternal love. But I had had seven years of this attitude. While familiarity hadn't yet bred contempt, it had bred familiarity. I could easily resist such charming statements, and they didn't deter me one iota from my goals. "Spock would love it. Oh, you know what I mean," I said, when by a raised brow he objected to my phraseology. "Take him on the Forge."

"He's doesn't need me. He's passed his Kahs Wan."

"He may not need you, but he **wants** you."

The other brow rose at that. "Amanda--"

I wasn't prepared to let him get a word in edgewise, lest he do what he usually does when he gets the upper hand in conversation – which is win any debate. "Oh, take him off and teach him something else, then. Astrophysics. Computers. Whatever. It will be good for both of you. And good for me, to spend some professional time at a conference. It's been a while, you know."

The latter statement made him sit back and reconsider. "I suppose given the circumstances, attending such a conference is a logical action," he said slowly, as if still trying to convince himself not to hate the idea. "With our diplomatic schedule, you have not had much opportunity to do so as of late."

"I'm glad you agree," I said. I knew that he had not actually come around and agreed. The he was still verbally trying out the radical notion of my – even temporarily – leaving him. But I took that half acquiescence and ran with it. "I'll make the reservations."

He looked at me again, for a long moment. I could tell that far from getting used to the idea, he liked it even less on reflection. That some considerable Vulcan discipline was required for him to accommodate it. But then he nodded. Once. A very controlled, very brief and sketchy Vulcan nod that gave me far more insight into his feelings about it than probably all my emotional expressions did in interpreting my behavior for him. But he had agreed, and that was all I needed.

"Sorry for interrupting your work," I said, before he had time to reconsider, or put any conditions on his tentative acquiescence. And in keeping with his reticent mood gave him a very brief and sketchy hug and kiss, by human standards, before walking out his office door.

In general, Sarek is nothing but decided. But contrary to his usual manner, he then proceeded to change his mind three times.

_To be continued…_


	2. Chapter 2

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 2**

I let Spock know about my trip at breakfast the next morning. If Sarek's control muted his reactions to merely hinting unease about my prospective absence, Spock's lesser control displayed flat out horror.

He dropped his spoon from where he'd been plowing through a bowl of fruit and cereal and stared at me, aghast.

"You're going away and leaving us?"

"I'm not **leaving** you," I explained, with perhaps faulty human logic. "I'm coming back."

"The necessity of coming back perhaps indicates that one **is** leaving," Sarek pointed out from his end of the table.

"Thanks. I didn't know that," I said somewhat snarkily. That sort of Vulcan precision regarding language gets very old, very fast. "You **knew** what I meant."

He tilted his head in a Vulcan shrug.

"You're going away and **leaving** us?" Spock said again, returning to the prevailing question.

"Just for a conference. For a few days. Then I'll be right back."

Spock looked from me to Sarek, with a totally appalled, 'What kind of a Vulcan clan leader allows **this**' sort of look on his face. Far from staring him down, Sarek met his eyes in a wordless exchange between them that I knew meant, "Yes, she's impossible, but she's human. What can even **I** do with material like this?"

Spock was unappeased at this abdication from Vulcan standards. "You can't go," he proclaimed to me.

"Oh, I can't, can I?" I returned, half amused.

"You'll never find your way home. You'll get lost."

"I won't get lost," I said. "And I have a return Starship ticket."

"You get lost even in the **Fortress**," my traitorous son pointed out, exasperated at my denseness.

That was, unfortunately, an indisputable and uncomfortable fact. In my defense, the place was ancient, meant to house an army. It had been built to protect the city of ShiKahr and the underground springs that led from the mountains the Fortress was built against to the oasis under ShiKahr. It was more historical monument than home now, and only tradition kept us resident. In my justification, we only lived in a certain wing, and I never got lost **there**. Well, hardly ever. Stone corridors can look a lot alike. But it hadn't helped that my over-candid son had been born with his father's unerring directional sense, and a passionate curiosity to explore.

When he was a toddler, he was forever disappearing into the bowels of the ancient edifice if I turned my back on him for even so much as a moment. But the worst of it was that though I could find him – that parental bond worked even for me, human that I was -- I couldn't find our way out. He could, but he would mischievously take advantage of my failing and take us on long meandering detours, determined to satisfy his curiosity, particularly when it was nap or bath time and only leading us out when hunger drove him to seek a meal. He hadn't forgotten that, of course. I hadn't forgotten that. I stared him down, my eyes narrowed at the memory. Spock looked away, well aware of his guilt in that regard.

"She'll get lost." Spock pronounced to his father, the court of highest appeal. "She **always** gets lost. She'll never find her way home."

This so clearly mirrored his father's unspoken fears that Sarek shifted uneasily. It was plainly obvious to both Vulcans that a human who couldn't find her way from one archaic stone corridor to another had no business traipsing around the galaxy on her own.

"I will **so** find my way, both there and back," I said crossly. "And I **am** going."

"But--" Spock protested.

"That's enough of that," I said.

Spock looked to Sarek and got the minute twitch head twitch to the left that was a Vulcan negative. Spock slumped into defeat and his appetite apparently gone, poked at his cereal. And then he straightened, finding a new area of outrage. "What am I going to eat?" he asked.

That was a material point. Sarek was excellent in planning the minute details of his son's education, from astrophysics to zoology, from telepathy to emotional control, from desert survival to Surak's philosophies. But he abdicated almost entirely from the lesser considerations of raising children. In fact, from most practical household details. Having always lived in a household of clan retainers, aides and servants before I booted most of them out to have as much of a normal family life as I could get on Vulcan, he did not cook, clean, or involve himself in the more prosaic chores of everyday life and child care. He knew perfectly well, for example, how to open a stasis unit, dial a cup of tea, or even use the food processors to procure a meal. At least, I believed that someone with all his intelligence and computer experience **ought** to be able to figure that out. Eventually. Not that he had shown much aptitude so far.

"I'll leave your father instructions." I said shortly.

This time Spock's look of incredulity was reserved for me. He gave his father a narrow evaluating look that clearly gave his view that if his meals depended on Sarek dishing up dinner, he'd have a better chance of survival out on the Forge.

"Maybe I should go away to school."

"For five days?"

"This is **totally** illogical," Spock muttered darkly into his cereal, clearly of the opinion that with his parents so mismanaging their affairs, it was a miracle he had survived till seven. Then he straightened and gave his father a speculative look. One I knew too well.

"If you're done with your breakfast, you can go to school," I said, hoping to nip such thoughts in the bud.

He looked at me, the corners of his mouth pulled in just a fraction, to prevent a betraying emotion from being revealed, but enough for me to be darkly suspicious of the secret delight it might be concealing.

"Don't. Even. Think. About. It." I warned him.

Sarek looked from one of us to the other, blissfully clueless. He would be. Spock rarely played up with Sarek, both because he'd worshiped his father during the worst of that phase, but also because he just wasn't with him as much. But Spock had inherited a mischievous temperament from both sides of his heritage, and Vulcan disciplines aside, was sometimes tempted to indulge in it, given the right circumstances.

Spock had gotten control of his expression and now looked as innocent as an angel. One with the pointed ears of the devil that was equally part of his nature.

"You're playing with fire," I warned.

He flicked a brow, indicating that he was well aware of that, but what was a poor, potentially motherless child to do but struggle along as best he could, when placed in such a situation?

"Go to school," I said, hoping to head off that thought right now.

"Yes, Mother," he said. "Good Day, Father," he said as he passed him. Butter wouldn't have melted in his mouth.

"That boy is dangerous," I said to his father. "Someday he's either going to be President of the Federation or locked up in jail. Or both."

Sarek wasn't interested in Spock, whose life path, as far as he was concerned, was already set in stone, beyond discussion. "Amanda, regarding this trip--"

"Don't **you** start."

"Perhaps it might be best--"

"I **am** going," I said. "And I am more than a little tired of this attitude of Vulcan superiority, particularly when you countenance it in our son, against me. I managed my life perfectly well **before** I met you, and I'd manage it perfectly well **without** you!"

He drew back and stared at me.

"Oh, you know what I mean," I said crossly.

"Do I?" he asked, with an enigmatic air that in a Vulcan meant he had reserved judgment.

I lost patience, and gathered up my briefcase. "Look, I've got to run if I'm not going to be late for class. You'd just better think of ways to deal with Spock. I know only too well that angelic innocence portends the exact opposite in a Vulcan, whether son or husband. You don't need to worry about me."

"Don't I?" he said, looking after me, a line between his brows. But I was too exasperated to take it any further.

_To be continued… _


	3. Chapter 3

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 3**

That evening Spock made himself scarce, kept his head down, literally and figuratively, with both Sarek and myself. Apart from a few speculative glances that I caught him giving us, he was clearly biding his time. For once, I didn't want to know what he was thinking. I had mentally passed him over to his alternate sponsor. Until I got back, his father could deal with him. Sarek being something of an unknown quantity for Spock in the receiving of mischievous pranks, I think my son needed extra time to calculate what, if anything, was safe to do.

I had no intention of warning either one of them. If Spock wanted to play with fire, let him salve his own burnt fingers.

Sarek held the same sort of pensive silence. Unfortunately I had no substitute available to deal with him. I knew he still wasn't sanguine about my going away, but I'd have to wait for him to make the next move before I could respond.

I chased Spock off to bed, and not only got through the briefcase of work I needed to finish before I left, I finalized my acceptance to the conference, drafted my keynote, and fitted in a shower. Then I pulled out my travel cases and tried to decide what to pack. I was reviewing my wardrobe critically, thinking I had far too many Vulcan clothes and not nearly any suitable Federation business wear when Sarek came in.

"What do you think?" I asked, holding up two candidates. "Hopelessly outdated, right? All I have that's current is fancy dress. Or Vulcan stuff that never goes out of style, and casual shorts and tops and shifts. I'm going to have to go shopping tomorrow."

"It's an academic conference," Sarek said, not passing judgment on either, instead looking around bemusedly at the piles of garments stacked on every level surface. "They will be listening to your ideas on your recent research, not paying attention to your clothes."

"Oh, you poor deluded soul," I said, looking at him pitiably, before I pored through the racks again. "That's exactly what they **are** going to be looking at. Hardly anyone cares about the **presentations**. Not at a **conference**. What can you be thinking of?"

This was clearly a novel notion for a Vulcan. "Then why do they attend?"

I counted out the reasons on my fingers. "To mingle. To crow over their achievements. To head hunt talent. Get the scoop on the latest Federation grants and university programs and salaries. Scope out research partners. Sniff out what ideas someone else is working on that they might steal. Not to mention the social side of things. There's lots of partying."

"Then I don't understand the purpose of having presenters."

I sighed, exasperated at having to explain something so obvious. "Be logical, darling. There has to be **some **ostensible reason to gather. Besides, the presenters' texts will all be in the conference proceedings for anyone who wants to look them up later. That's what everyone usually does. The proceedings would be pretty empty without presenters." I returned to my salient point. "No, before any of them will listen to a word of my speech, they'll be considering the questions really important to the academic mind when I walk up to that podium. Like 'Has she lost it in seven years of marriage?'"

If it was possible for a Vulcan to blanch, Sarek did. "Lost what?" he dared ask.

I took my head out of the closet, curious at his tone. Then, seeing his face, found it interesting that after seven years of marriage, even to a Vulcan, I could still blush. "Not **that**! What a prurient mind you have!"

He drew up, having at least the grace to look embarrassed. I mean really. Everyone knew we had a child.

"I meant my **edge**," I clarified with dignity. "Both personally as well as professionally." I looked at him, a hand on my hip, my head tilted impatiently at his still clueless state. "You know. 'Has she gotten old and frumpy?' 'Has she given up?' 'Does she still weigh less than I do?'"

"Frumpy? What is frumpy?" he asked suspiciously.

"Sarek, I got **married**. Had a baby. I've been living out in the back of beyond. Nothing that a hot shot young Nobel Laureate should have done. In the game of academia, I took the equivalent of a **fatal** time out. The only people happier than you and I when we got married were my colleagues, crowing over my professional demise."

He bridled at that. "You teach at the VSA. An institution which is unparalled in the Federation."

I had been examining some possible outfits, but ended up tossing the rejected suits down in disgust. They were definitely frumpy, outdated and **old**. "So **you** say. Humans think otherwise. Vulcan may be a political powerhouse in the Federation, but it is well outside the sandbox of academia. Not the VSA per se, but the politics of Academia. I haven't been seen around much. I was a big deal before I married you. And then I virtually disappeared. My so-called colleagues will be only too happy to see if I can be brought down a peg or two. Fortunately, I did win the Zi, so they can't stick too many pins in me about what journals I have or have not published in lately or if I make more or less than they do. But personal issues will be fair game. So I intend to look twice as chic as usual," I picked up another item and, holding it against me, twirled critically before the mirror. "Well, there's no hope for any of these. Hopelessly outdated. I will have to buy two new suits tomorrow. And a few fancy things that look spectacularly **non** diplomatic for the post sessions. I'll get Kaitlin to open up early, before my first class. She generally keeps somewhat _au courant_, even in this backwater."

"Vulcan is not –"he objected. "I had no idea that you considered Vulcan inadequate in these ways. Regardless, it is **not** a backwater."

"Fashion wise, my dear, it is so far in the backwater, it's not even in the wading pool category. It's shameful." I pointed a finger at him. "Do you realize there's not a single important Vulcan fashion designer in the Federation? You really ought to look into that," I said, tossing another garment over my shoulder as I burrowed further into my closet.

He raised an ironic brow, and pushed aside a pile of clothes to sit down. "On what prioritization do you suggest? Somewhere below my current negotiations for the new Neutral Zone borders?"

I lifted my head briefly from the burrow. "That was beneath you. It was just a suggestion. Vulcan's a Federation powerhouse in trade in general. But you do realize that someone has overlooked an **entire retail sector**?"

"I have not overlooked it. I never would consider it."

"It was a rhetorical 'you'," I said loftily. "I didn't mean you personally. And don't make fun of me."

"I was not mocking you."

"You were laughing at me in a most unVulcan way. But go right ahead if you must. It's good practice for me. I'll get enough of it at the upcoming conference. Anyway, I was just pointing out Vulcan designers might look into fashioning something **besides** computer chips."

"Duly noted. I'll suggest it to Soran. But I am puzzled. You are not usually so concerned with your…image. You usually complain when you have to buy new gowns for diplomatic events. And why **go**, if you believe your colleagues will be…unduly critical?"

"The diplomatic grind is different. I have to do that. And let's face it; things for the usual stuffy soirees we attend are a little boring. Nothing too eclectic. Elegant, at best. I just have realized how long it's been since I've had any fun, wardrobe wise. Or had the opportunity to go a little wild."

Sarek eyed me at this. "Wild," he repeated slowly, stretching the word out as if to take in its full, and dangerous, meaning.

I had been holding up another outfit against me, looked at myself, front and back in the mirror and sighed. "I suppose there's nothing to be done about my **hair** in the little time I have. What a nuisance."

He sat up at that, drawn out of his reverie. "What about your hair?" he asked, frowning suspiciously.

"It's hopelessly long," I looked at Sarek as he shifted restlessly. "Oh, I know. It's traditional. And you'd probably blow a gasket if I actually did cut it."

"Cut it?"

"I said **if**. Keep your gaskets unblown. But really Sarek, it's totally impractical from a professional standpoint. It's ridiculous."

"It's traditional."

"I know, I know," I sighed. "Spare me the lecture. I've heard it all before." I frowned. "I suppose all I can do is put it up in as tight a French twist as I can, at least during the business sessions, and hope for no snarky comments."

"You would not plan on wearing it **down**?" he asked, scandalized.

"Sarek, this won't be Vulcan. It won't matter if I let my hair down in public. Literally," I amended, seeing he was familiar with the colloquialism.  
"Not figuratively."

He didn't look too convinced at the distinction. "It will matter to me."

"But you won't even be there, so your Vulcan sensibilities could hardly be offended. Oh, for goodness sake, don't look so uneasy. When in Rome, you know… What are you looking so upset about? I wore it loose at times on Earth, even after we were married."

"I am not looking upset."

I shook my head reprovingly. "You know you've gotten very provincial yourself in the last few years. My going away will be good for you too."

"Amanda," Sarek drew a breath and eyed the itinerary I had set aside on my dressing table. "Perhaps it would be better for you to-"

I knew then I had blown it. And I couldn't let him get those words out. I had begun the idea of attending this conference only as a mild diversion. But it had grown on me until now Rigel had become my own personal Mecca of the galaxy, as alluring to me as if I were a Crusader, rather than just another college teacher, and as if an image of the Holy Grail were hanging over that normally boring old planet winking on and off like a mid-twentieth century drive-in sign.

I quickly shelved any notion in his head that he could dissuade me. "Sarek, I know this is not exactly traditional. And you're not entirely keen on the idea. But I don't care. I'm still going. Even if all the past clan heads from Surak down to your father rise up from their graves on Mount Selaya, lay down on the sand between me and the spaceport, and weep up the equivalent of a Vulcan Nile. I'll still swim across it and board that starship. I'm **going**."

Even displeased, Sarek was not devoid of humor. He did his best to look stern, or at least impassive, but his lips twitched. After a moment, his sensibility restored, he gave a little sigh and said. "Very well. Since you wish it so."

I grinned. "I do. Normally I can take or leave these things. But for some reason now I'm **so** looking forward to it. I feel like I'm being let out of school. Or out of jail."

"Jail?" Sarek said, losing his good humor.

I sank down on a chair, absently crumpling the clothes I was holding. "Oh, you know what I mean. That summer vacation, leaving everything behind, anything is possible feeling." I sighed, starry eyed in reflective pleasure. "I feel like I'm sixteen again." Then I looked up at my husband's face, set against what had to be a scandalized reaction, and sighed again, less pleasurably. "Well, maybe you don't understand. I just didn't realize how much I needed a vacation."

"We have taken vacations before."

"Ages ago. Lifetimes ago. On Earth, before and just after we were married. It's been that long."

"If you had told me you required a vacation, we could have taken one."

I frowned at him. "But that's the point. I didn't **know** I needed one. I didn't even particularly **want** to go to this conference. But just now, I feel I could fly there without a starship. I'm so **happy**."

"Amanda," He drew a breath and picked the itinerary I had set aside on my dressing table. "Perhaps…I do have some unfinished business with the Rigellian ambassador. It might work out well if I accompanied you."

I glanced at him. "I can't stop you if you really want to. So long as you don't expect **me** to do anything diplomatic. I'll be quite busy. And you'd need to be too, because you would be bored to death at one of my conferences. Anyway, it's not really logical for you to go just to accompany me. And what about Spock? Don't you think it's time you took your turn at a little child-rearing?"

Sarek looked vexed, as if he were ready to cosign our son to any convenient dungeon. "Arrangements could be made."

I thought about that. It was time for me to pull out the heavy artillery if I was going to get away on vacation scot free. In the last year, Sarek had begun talking about bonding Spock to a prissy little girl named T'Pring. I didn't like the idea any more than I liked the girl. I didn't think Spock cared much for her either. But she was going to prove useful to me now. "Well, since you are so keen about T'Pring, I suppose Spock should stay with her and her family. That way, they all can get to know each other before any decisions are finalized. A week with them would let them get really acquainted. I wouldn't want to leave him with anyone else. I'll call them tomorrow and arrange it, shall I?"

That put a lematya in his garden, just as I had calculated.

"It is logical, isn't it?" I asked sweetly.

He drew up a brow. I waited. Sarek, of course, was more than usually adjuring of Spock's behavior when we were with T'Pring and her parents. I knew he wouldn't want him to spend an unsupervised week in their company. In spite of all Sarek's influence, either from his human heritage or my inadvertent example, Spock's Vulcan demeanor wasn't perfect. Frankly, I don't think it suffered that much – even Sarek had his moments where he lost control. But Sarek tended to excuse his own lapses, even as he came down hard on Spock's. And even Sarek wouldn't expect that Spock could pull off a fully Vulcan act for that length of time with T'Pring's oh-so-stuffy parents. Away from his father's monitoring presence, our irrepressible son would never be able to hold it together that long. It was one way to effectively kill at least one of two bad plans. If I had to give up my vacation, at least it would be for an excellent cause. Spock would hate it in the short run, but I was counting on him not being able to hold it together. And in the long run, his being shed of that girl would more than compensate me for the loss of my trip.

"Spock is not ready for that. But there's no reason why he can't board at school as he usually does," Sarek countered.

"It's not worth it for five days." I put my cards on the table. "I won't go if it means putting Spock in boarding school."

He didn't say anything for a long moment. I didn't say anything for a long moment.

"Sarek," I said into the silence. "I'll be back in five days. And I don't want you to take this personally, or as any reflection on Vulcan or our marriage. I just really want to go alone."

He didn't like it. He really didn't like it. He looked at me. I looked at him and smiled at him in a way that had once gotten me anything. I realized I had gotten out of practice in more than academics. "Please?"

He drew a long, dissatisfied breath. "Very well."

I let out a breath of my own in relief. "Come on. You can help me put these away."

He gave the stacks of clothes a disparaging glare and reached for one pile. "If they are unsuitable to wear, why retain them?"

I snatched the garments from him and clutched them. I knew that Vulcan tone. Sarek did not understand the attachment a human woman can have for some things. He was perfectly capable of tossing the entire contents of my closet in the recycler, good and bad together. "Don't you dare. They're fine. For here."

"To wear in this backwater?" he asked, still sounding miffed.

"To wear at **home**," I said.

It must hit the right note, though I hadn't meant it to generate quite the responsive chord it did. He gave me a look that made me drop what I was holding, suddenly uncaring. In fact, even the clothes I was wearing suddenly seemed a little too warm.

"So long as you don't forget it," he said and gathered me up rather than a bundle of clothes. Then he pulled his tunic over his head. Clearly he was a little warm too.

"The bed is covered with junk," I said, when I had breath.

He cleared it with one sweep of his arm, pushing everything on the floor, without letting go of me with the other. And then we neither of us had any use for clothes.

But when I woke the next morning, I found he had been busy. Not only had he **not** recycled anything, but every stitch of my wardrobe was neatly back in its place.

A minor Vulcan reminder. Ready for me when I came back.

_To be continued… _


	4. Chapter 4

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 4**

The next day was blast off day. I was going to break loose of Vulcan ties at least for a few days and return to a life of freedom, sans husband or child.

I had left my husband detailed instructions, broken down hour by hour and day by day: where Spock could be found at any time, either lesson, or practice or tutor, what times he was supposed to rise, eat, and sleep, and what he would eat.

I had also left prepared meals for each day numbered in the stasis unit. A simple numerical and chronological association seemed best suited to my husband's logical mind. All Sarek had to do was follow the dates and numbers on the list and at least they wouldn't starve.

Sarek looked at my instructions, detailed for even the least experienced of fathers, the barest of understandings. His eyes bulged as he scanned the closely printed pages. "Spock knows all this, does he not?"

I hesitated at saying the truth, which was that **Spock's** knowing it was hardly the point. My son had taken an obstinate set against my going away, refusing to reconcile himself. Before he'd left for school he hadn't even wanted to say goodbye to me. I suspected his behavior was calculated to try and guilt me into changing my mind and staying. I had no idea how easy, or hard, Spock was going to make Sarek's temporary management of both parental roles. I had left instructions with Spock's school and his tutors to keep a special eye on him, just in case. They had been perfectly polite, but had given me the distinct impression they regarded me as engaging in needless human worry, reminding me of their excellent staffing and security setup which made any extra precautions entirely unnecessary.

"He does know it," I temporized, "But he might need some … supervision."

"I trust not," Sarek flicked a brow in perfect Vulcan confidence, ending that discussion.

Sighing, I gave up the cause as lost. I had warned him. I had made the lists. The ball was in his court.

I looked around, but it seemed everything I needed to do had been done. I had completed my shopping yesterday. My cases were lovingly packed and had been standing ready by the door since the night before. Sarek was going to take time off from Council to deliver me to the spaceport this morning. I'd like to think the latter was out of some sense of affection, but I had a sneaking suspicion he just wanted to be sure I got on the right shuttle.

Still I was confident I had planned every detail with the fervor of General Patton going up against Rommel. Unfortunately I hadn't reckoned on my own particular Desert Fox - or fox cub. The first intimations of doom came as we were having a last cup of tea before leaving. I was reiterating, for good measure, Spock's itinerary for the day with Sarek.

Sarek listened with half an ear, paying more attention to triple checking my return tickets. It was frustrating, but hard for me to do more than suggest that he really needed to attend to this. That Spock might take a little more supervision than he expected. Still, I didn't want to say it too plainly, or jinx what I hoped would be an uneventful, peaceful transition of power from one head of state to the next, and that the civil population in question wouldn't rise up in anarchy. But before I could get a quarter of the way through it, Sarek received a priority call and went off to his office to take it.

When he didn't return in a few minutes, I followed him there to see what the hold-up was.

"Sarek, I'm gong to be late," I said, pointing to my watch.

He looked up from the comm. "Spock has disappeared from school."

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but I was. In fact my mind froze into a sort of existential babble. Why wouldn't he choose today to skip school? After all, there's no time like the present; a stitch in time saves nine; why put off till tomorrow what you can do today and of course a rolling stone gathers no moss. Not to mention all my best laid plans now lost, lost, lost. I swallowed hard and tried to pull my overloaded brain into some sort of rational functioning.

"How? Where?" I asked stupidly. But in spite of myself, my brain had reactivated into some sort of keen analysis. The ratio of teachers to pupils at Spock's prestigious school ran at a low of three to one and a high of five to one. He was delivered there by a Council guardsman. The school itself had a security system worthy of Fort Knox - as I had just been so haughtily reminded. Of all places, I would have thought his ability to vanish from there would be akin to the likelihood of him stepping through a looking glass into Wonderland. "How could he have disappeared?" I asked with some heat. "Did he turn himself into a rabbit and fall down a hole? Darn it, I warned them to **watch** him!"

The literary allusions went right over Sarek's head, if he even noticed them. "With Spock, I would not dare to speculate. I am told he was present in morning assembly, then disappeared before his first class."

"Is someone even looking for him?"

"Everyone. He does not answer on his personal comm. It is to be surmised he left it behind, lest it be used to triangulate on him. They do not believe he was kidnapped."

"Little they know," I said bitterly. "If they don't know where he is." I knew, instinctively, that he had done this in an attempt to keep me from leaving. But I was only ninety percent sure of it. And that didn't mean he couldn't get into real trouble just the same. And there was the remote, panicky possibility that he **had** been kidnapped. A trace of fear chilled me, raised goose bumps on my arms in spite of the warm Vulcan air.

"We've got to find him," I said. "Let's go."

"He is being sought by all proper authorities. I will search for him myself as soon as I deliver you to the spaceport."

"You can't imagine I'd leave not knowing what's happened to him?" I asked. "No way."

"**Nothing** will happen to him." Sarek countered tersely. "I will see to that."

"You can't be sure until we find him. And there isn't time to argue. Let's go."

In spite of my telling him to ignore them, Sarek took my bags. My tickets and passport were already in a folder in my jacket. But at the moment I could have cared less. The pages from my carefully contrived list, left haphazardly on the table as we rushed out the door, were scattered by the breeze of our passage and blew away down the hall. Only a few of them would be found by the household staff, who seeing the English words, would put them carefully on the desk in my office where I would find them when I returned. Sarek, the person for whom they'd been so carefully compiled, never would.

But our eyes now were only for Spock. We started by swooping low over his favorite hide outs and play areas on the Forge, me straining my eyes for his foreshortened figure while Sarek checked infrared scanners. Time was growing short and the futility of our efforts was beginning to hit me. On a desert the size of the Forge, Spock could hide out for days and not be found. I had resigned myself into missing my trip – I wouldn't go off planet with my child missing, even if it was most likely he had stubbornly secreted himself in some hidey hole just for that purpose. My thoughts on finding him, which had first ranged to giving him a good spanking in return for the scare he'd given us, now shifted to wanting only to clutch him close in thankfulness for finding him. Why did Vulcan have to be such a huge, dangerous planet? Why did my Vulcans have to be such continual trials? Why did I ever marry a Vulcan in the first place? The jury was still out but I feared when they returned the verdict would be clear. Stockholm would have been affirmed in their recent rejection, exactly as my son had feared. This girl was just **not **Nobel Laureate material.

"He could die out here," I muttered.

"He's been fully desert trained," Sarek reminded me. "He has passed his Kahs Wan."

"Oh, that's crap," I said, impatiently consigning five thousand years of Vulcan tradition to the recycler.

Sarek glanced at me, but wisely did not comment.

Then we got a call, from the Terran Embassy of all places. Spock had been there seeking a Terran passport. He'd been refused on grounds of not being of age, and told to wait while his parents were contacted. Unfortunately, the Embassy staff, doubly leery about the diplomatic dangers of laying hands on a Vulcan or being accused of holding a Vulcan citizen hostage, had only **asked** him to remain. They were reluctant to detain him. We could hardly blame them, since legally they didn't have the right. Spock had ducked out the door while they impotently watched.

We nabbed him sauntering down the street not five blocks away from the Embassy. He seemed careless of the fact that half the security staff on the planet were searching for him and his potential kidnappers, looking for all the world as if he were out for a stroll, except that he had his school rucksack on his back, stuffed with it seemed like more than its usual contents. With minutes to spare before the starship shuttle was due to depart. Sarek didn't bother to land, he swooped down over our son, hovering about about four inches from his nose, opened the hatch and growled the Vulcan equivalent of, "Get in."

Spock looked from left to right, as if wondering where his potential rescuers were when he needed them. But then he succumbed to the inevitabile and climbed in with all the composure of a prince ascending - whether to the throne or the guillotine was still moot.

"Oh, Spock, how could you?" I said. "Didn't you promise me you were going to be good?"

"I thought you should have someone to accompany you," he replied calmly. "And since Father is too busy, I was the next logical choice. I wanted to go to the shuttle boarding dock, but when I got to the spaceport they told me I couldn't go through security without a passport." He eyed Sarek warily. "So I went to the Embassy to get one."

"Why did you go to the Terran one?" Sarek asked in his most even, controlled voice.

Spock gave him a look. "I could hardly go to the Vulcan one, could I?"

Seeing Sarek was struck dumb enough that he was not about to immediately immolate his only son, Spock added, with a trace of injury. "They had no right to tell on me. I **told **them I have diplomatic immunity. That's why I went to them. These people have no sense of confidential negotiations. I don't know how Father can work with them."

I choked. Sarek and I traded a glance. I didn't have the emotional control to comment on this but I made a face at Sarek, warning him to keep his Vulcan cool. He just flicked a brow.

"I don't know where you came to such an erroneous opinion, but there is no time for this now. I assure you we will discuss this later," Sarek promised him.

"How did you plan to get on the ship?" I asked. "You don't even have a ticket."

He didn't answer, looking stubborn. I suddenly had a sinking suspicion he had planned to stowaway somehow. And had a mental fear of him attempting to follow Sarek and me wherever we went in the galaxy, now that the idea had entered his head. "Spock, you must promise never to try anything like this again."

"He won't," Sarek said. "I will see to that."

Spock slid his eyes to his father and looked away, without comment.

"Promise me you won't and your father will have nothing more to say to you about this," I said with a dash of inspiration. Sarek looked at me in surprise at this casual usurping of his authority. I threw up my hands in exasperation and excuse. "Look I don't want to worry about him coming after us every time we go off planet. Much as I would like to draw and quarter him myself, just as you would, I think it's a fair trade.

Sarek flicked a brow in some sort of concession. "Perhaps you have a point."

By this time, I had given up my trip as impossible, but Vulcans are capable of multitasking even in the face of potential personal catastrophe. And unlike humans, they have a time sense that lets them know precisely the amount of seconds remaining before a deadline. Even as we were arguing, Sarek was flying. By virtue of Council Emblazons, diplomatic immunity (in disregarding every traffic law), and having some of the guard swooping in ahead of us and clearing a path, Sarek broke every time record to the spaceport. I made my starship connection with moments to spare. I gave my Vulcans an abstracted farewell, more worried about my delinquent son than fond goodbyes.

"**Try** to be good," I adjured Spock. "And **help** your father." I was thinking more along the lines of him simply not getting into any more trouble. But I had forgotten you have to watch every word with Vulcans. Unbeknownst to me, Spock took this quite literally.

"I have already," he said. "And I've helped you to find your way home too."

"What do you mean?" I asked, half amused, half alarmed.

"Last call, Miss," said the shuttle attendant.

"Amanda," Sarek said, handing me my cases. I took them, thinking what a fiasco it would be to have walked off without them in this confusion.

Little did I know at this point that leaving the cases by the door last night had given Spock ample opportunity to already 'help' me. He had raided our library and lovingly added several star charts of the Rigillian and Eridani quadrants from his father's astrogation collection, priceless ancient documents from Vulcan's first Pre Reform spacefaring culture. Just possessing these treasures of Vulcan antiquity without authorization was grounds for me to spend the rest of my life in a very secure Vulcan lockup. For good measure he'd included an archaic copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" from my side of the library. Then he had added some contributions of his own, apparently purchased from the kind of tourist shops catering to outworlders on Vulcan: a copy of the Terry Tourist Guide to Vulcan. And a t-shirt printed with a map of the Milky Way galaxy with a large arrow and the legend "Vulcan is here" in a size large enough to dwarf even Sarek. To make room for all these guideposts to a safe return, carefully chosen to cover all cultural variances, he had removed both of the new suits I'd purchased, leaving me with a choice of evening wear or the oversized T-shirt. But I wouldn't find out any of this until I unpacked on the starship.

"Goodbye, be good," I said to them both as I boarded the shuttle. Both Sarek and I completely overlooked that Spock had failed to exactly deliver the promise we'd requested.

"Why did you wish to accompany her?" I heard Sarek ask Spock, before the pressure doors closed. "There was no logical necessity."

"But there is. And you were busy," Spock said reasonably. "**So****meone** should go with her. She will **never** find her way home."

"She will," Sarek said.

Spock shook his head. "We are probably going to have to go and retrieve her, the way I do when she gets lost in the Fortress." He gave his father a sidelong glance. "You're always at work when it happens. You don't know. I **always** do it." He sighed a little. "I don't mind," he assured him, "But she never **can** find her way back. I do not understand how humans navigate starships through the galaxy. Although this time," he added thoughtfully, "I did give her a map."

The last glimpse I had of them before the shuttle doors closed was of Sarek looking pensive.

_To be continued…._


	5. Chapter 5

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 5**

The starship was the usual sort of commercial conveyance, crowded and a bit shabby, permeated with that faint dirty socks locker room odor typical of almost every starship I'd ever been on from commercial liner to Federation flagship. No matter how good the air scrubbers, nor how new the ship, I'd never known one not to be plagued with the tinge of too many beings reusing the same recycled enclosed air, over and over and over. The newer ships inject the air with ozone in the final scrubbing process, and some even add a hint of scent to try to eradicate it, but they never really succeed. I pity anyone would ever be forced to work in that noxious atmosphere. Still, I smiled in delight at being on it, and tried not to breathe too deeply, at least until my nose stopped noticing the odor.

Due to being an almost celebrity, given my dual political and academic notoriety, I got seated at the captain's table at dinner, next to him in fact. I was careful to refer to his ship with all due respect, which is all I discovered ship's captains really care about. I never mentioned the smell of his vessel, which was not helped by the new odor of warmed up, reconstituted food. I had the option of meat or vegetarian courses, not that it mattered, since none of the food was real in that sense. But I was still feeling enough influence from virtuous Vulcan that I chose the veg. I smiled at the captain, who smiled back at me without ever really seeing me or saying anything. Captains of starliners are all so dazed by their incessant flow of passengers I think we are all like zoo animals to them. I've never really heard anything cogent from a ship's captain in response to anything I've ever said. I am not interested in the wheels and gears that drive their ships, and I think they are not interested in anything else. Also, I firmly believe the interstellar radiation fries their brains. I could have answered all his polite remarks in perfect Vulcanir and I suspect he would never have noticed anything amiss. Still, his ship got me to Rigel on time, with the conference due to start the next day. So I was grateful to him.

Then the adventure really started. For the first time in seven years, I woke up alone.

I don't mean I'd never woken up physically alone since my marriage. There were plenty of days when Sarek rose before me, or when he might have been stranded at Council by a violent sandstorm, or went off planet for a day or even two to one of Vulcan's sister planets.

But we'd never been light years apart like this. Sarek had a Vulcan male's dislike – horror was a better term - of being far separated from his bondmate. Even before I married, the healers had let me know all about these tedious Vulcan biological requirements. About the bond; the lack of divorce; the fact that Vulcans' attitudes toward wives could be archaic by human standards. They let me know how little they believed humans could fulfill the requirements of marriage to a Vulcan, and did their best to dissuade both Sarek and myself from sullying his pure Surak-descended bloodlines with my commonor human blood. I can't say the drawbacks hadn't given me some pause, before and after I married. But Sarek had been pigheaded, and I had been in love, and we had gone ahead anyway. To my credit, I had always felt a strong sense of duty toward the Vulcan requirements of my marriage. I had walked into it with my eyes open. I wasn't the type to welch on a deal.

Still, there was such a thing as compromise. I'd brought plenty to my side of the marriage, and it was past time for Sarek to give a little too. So I felt no guilt over my five day hiatus, however distressing it was to my wedded spouse. But because of all this I was facing the prospect of days without Sarek's company practically for the first time since I'd met him. I hadn't realized how amazingly liberating I would feel.

Not that I didn't love my husband, or that I felt any regret for our marriage. But even I, enamored of him as I was, had to admit that he tended to be a tad…overbearing. He had this bad habit. He could walk into a room and suck up all the oxygen, on that oxygen limited planet, with the first word he uttered, leaving everyone around him struck dumb and gasping for air. It was a very useful trait for an Ambassador, though mildly annoying in a husband. I had to learn to talk fast in any confrontation before I was metaphorically and sometimes literally swept off my feet and cast under his spell. Those descendants of Surak weren't hereditary clan leaders for nothing. We mere mortals had no defense against him. Still, I loved him anyway. And after all, a husband presents enormous difficulties at times, regardless of his species.

But faced with a prospect of days without him, it was amazing how much more air there seemed to be, and it wasn't just the higher oxygen levels of Rigel. I hadn't realized how much I had come to consider Sarek's likes and dislikes, Vulcan's ways and mores, in even trivial decisions, from what to make for dinner to how I wore my hair. Having a child, of course, added to that. Suddenly you spend your days riding herd on a miniature Vulcan (and a Vulcan child who doesn't need riding herd on is deathly ill). You get completely caught up in everyone outside yourself. You squeeze the rest of your life, your career, and your own amusements, in the smaller and smaller spaces left over from all those demanding Vulcan egos. It can be a bit exhausting.

But now I had left the care of my Vulcans into each other's logical hands. I was breathing free, and not just from the extra oxygen, though that added a nice touch. Oxygen is such a lovely drug. I knew I'd pay for all this indulgence when I got back to Vulcan, if only in a stint on triox. But for now I felt fifteen and fancy free. And just a little bit euphoric. Almost single, dare I say it. Why I could do almost anything. I could eat a hamburger. Though I didn't really want a hamburger. I could go out, wearing what I wished without regard for the larger conventions of Vulcan society that I paid so much lip service to at home. People would regard it as entirely normal if I smiled or laughed. They would only think I had bumped my knee or gotten my feelings hurt if I cried, rather than think I had lost my mind. I could shake a hand, kiss a boy, fall in love…

Well, perhaps I was getting a little too far ahead of myself.

But I thought I was certainly going to have a fine time. I settled down to enjoy myself.

It was nice that my keynote was the first major event of the conference. It let me get most of my work out of the way first, though I did have a lecture to give later on my research. The keynote was more like entertainment. But after years of dealing with the Federation Press, both legitimate and obnoxious, I could step in front of a podium without a qualm, and compose this sort of speech without thinking twice. It was one of the skills that Sarek had come to appreciate in me, though he'd hardly married me for it, as some critics snarkily supposed.

I'd composed something light, mildly flattering and inspiring in its casual inference that we ethologists, ethnologists and linguists were singlehandedly paving the way for peace and mutual understanding in the Federation (politicians and diplomats, not to mention the Fleet do help, but less face it, they would all be useless without the ability to understand what we are all trying to communicate which we provided).

With a touch of humor, a few not too personal anecdotes and some quiet disparagement I had most of the persuadable audience geared up to have a great conference, and go back to their labs and research studies with renewed vigor.

Sarek isn't the only one who is good at public speaking.

After the keynote, we had the reception. I accepted congratulations on the Zi and the speech, responding to questions on my current research. I accepted a glass of champagne but was careful to stop at one. I was already euphoric enough on the extra oxygen. I didn't want to risk getting too silly or improvident. It was enough to be enfolded back in the embrace of my first clan, albeit a professional one.

I chatted with colleagues, caught up with old friends, exchanged gossip about programs and salaries and professorships. There were usual rumors of terrible attacks on faculty tenure, as if it would be the end of the academic world. The sessions were fascinating. I did my best to sidestep any too personal questions with a smile so as not to give offence.

It was a useful first day. I snagged two new promising research assistants who were dying to come to the VSA and were seeking my recommendation. I got a grant proposal for a half million Federation credits practically thrown in my lap - and the VSA, for all its vaunted singularism was like all academic institutions in that it never sneered at a lucrative grant regardless of its origin. And I received five job offers, a couple of them real plums, with department chairships and fully funded research opportunities and personal staff guarantees. One of them was even at the Sorbonne, a place where I had done some graduate work. My head spun at memories of Paris in the spring. I sighed, just a little, at the thought of a life that included an apartment on the Left Bank, daily views of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. Vacations to Provence and the Cote d'Azur.

I didn't say no to any of these job offers right away. I collected them like love letters, to savor for a while.

I was having such a good time; I had left all the cares of family entirely behind me. At least until I went back to my room late in the afternoon and almost perfunctorily checked messages.

Sarek had sent nothing, but I hadn't really expected to hear from him. He wasn't the chatty type, and certainly not one to send over insecure subspace email any professions of love, affection or just that he was desperately missing me. What I did get, that gave me pause, was a cryptic little message from son Spock.

No professions of love or absence making the heart grow fonder here either. Instead, he let me know that in spite of the fact that he'd had no satisfactory breakfast before a prospectively hard day at school, his father being sadly deficient in serving up adequate meals, he still had passed several level tests in math. My jaw dropped.

I sat down suddenly, alarm bells all down my jangled nerves, just as my dear son had intended. "You wouldn't," I muttered. "You little brat."

Were I a bull, he could not have held up a more equivalent red flag. From carefree happiness, I was now desperately anxious to know what had gone on at these so-called exams.

At the same time, I didn't want to hear one word about it. Not from Spock. Not even from Sarek, either. Not until I knew the real score. I emailed a sympathetic teacher at Spock's school, and went back to the conference, trying not to bite my nails.

During the afternoon I sat on several panel sessions, one on how ethology and similar studies could aid the Federation in increasing understanding between alien species, and in resolving disputes. I smiled as I ventured my anecdotes and opinions and tried not to think how little use it could sometimes be on the homefront among my own personal aliens.

When I got back to my room and checked my messages I had my answer. It made me wince in sympathy for Sarek. I was glad to be lightyears away on Rigel so I could avoid the immediate temptation of doing my only son and heir an injury. He had deliberately created a scene. Why I could barely begin to understand, but it certainly seemed aimed at getting my attention by putting him in direct conflict with his father. And at school too, of all places, and with one of his favorite subjects.

Spock had always done well at school. His mixed heritage didn't seem to hold him back at all. He was especially good at the physical sciences and math: a real chip off the old Llangons. He could never resist anything with an equal sign. Whereas, as my Vulcans knew, I could barely do basic arithmetic before I needed a computer, humans not being natural lightening calculators. I tried not to hold their prejudices against them.

When he was a naughty preschooler I could always bring Spock back in line by threatening to curtail his math puzzles. When he went to school, he excelled in those studies. Most of the teachers at his school were admirable educators who judged Spock on his merits, rather than his maternal heritage. But then his math instructor took a mini-sabbatical to work on some arcane formula. The replacement tutor promptly resisted the notion that Spock could make the kind of progress he had been making. Spock had come home from school increasingly frustrated, finally questioning me how he should handle this. He had become self-conscious about being perceived as different from his peers, and he really didn't want to make the scene that challenging this teacher would entail. We'd talked it over for a few days and decided that since most of Spock's instruction was automated, and his real teacher would soon be back, we'd just overlook the substitute's shortcomings. Not that I gave a damn about sparing the teacher. I just didn't see any need to add any more stress and trauma to my son's educational life. Relieved on that score, Spock went happily forward on his own, sometimes querying his old teacher if he hit a sticky point in his advanced studies. But in the meantime, he was taking examinations and answering questions only on the lesson plans his present tutor administered, without revealing how he had gone ahead. We never told Sarek. Neither of us thought it was worth the confrontation that would ensure. The Forge has no fury like a righteous Vulcan father scorned.

Until this morning the subterfuge had gone well. Then Spock had taken at least a certain number of level tests well past what the tutor had expected. The tutor believed he knew Spock's level of accomplishment could not extend so far. He promptly accused Spock of cheating. And Sarek had been called to school to answer for his son.

When I handed over care of Spock to his father, I hadn't expected he'd have to handle this. I didn't want to envision why Spock had done this. He knew better.

One thing Spock and I have learned, had come to count on in our various lives of crime – if it is a crime on Vulcan to deviate in any way from Vulcan standards, and that's how most Vulcans see it – is that because of the varying levels of humanity inherent in our natures, he and I could never be perfect Vulcans all the time. We gave lip service to the goal around his father, but we knew better, he and I. We also believed implicitly that it was better **not** to let Sarek get too involved with our various indiscretions. It made all our lives so much pleasanter.

Spock and I were equally in league with the idea that what Sarek didn't know in this regard, he couldn't disapprove of. And it couldn't hurt him, or us. It wasn't so much in a spirit of being deceptive. We were honestly just trying to keep the peace in the family, and our Vulcan image, and spare all of us from circumstances that we knew Sarek was better off remaining in ignorance about. The simple fact was, we didn't think alike. Sarek was logical. I was not. And however much natural aptitude Spock might have for the logical life from his father's side, he had unfortunately received too large a dose of sheer human wickedness from his mother's human side to avoid being uncontaminated.

I don't think Sarek was entirely unaware of this. Spock had always had a propensity for practical jokes. I think Sarek simply expected that training and discipline would cure him. As for me, he knew the limits training and discipline had as regards humans, and just hoped for the best.

But I understood what Sarek did not, that Spock's having mastered some emotional control had **not** made him any less mischievous. It had merely given his little mischievous, practical joking side a straighter face. He had simply become the most **composed** criminal either Sarek or I were ever likely to meet.

Maturity had let Spock conceal that side of himself most of the time. And he was bloodless in one respect; he was never in a hurry, waiting for the opportune moment and method to strike unawares. He was the Vulcan godfather of practical jokers, with a figurative horse for every victim's bed, a memory like an elephant, and the patience of Job dealing with the Almighty. It didn't auger well for the math tutor. Nor for Sarek or myself.

So the scene was set. Sarek didn't know anything about Spock's unorthodox advancement program in mathematics. He had gone into Spock's school like the sacrificial lamb to slaughter. Not that he had suspected Spock of cheating. He did suspect him of regressing into the pre-Kahs Wan habit of playing practical jokes and finding some way to make it appear he had passed those levels, when he had not. So Sarek went to school full of Vulcan ire for his son's mischievous ways without knowing the mischief lay in another area, and that Spock was setting everyone up.

It all came out. Spock proved composedly and conclusively to a jury consisting of Sarek, the head master (who suspected the real truth) and the tutor that he knew the passed material perfectly well. And had known it for some time. The truth, and the teacher's prejudices then were revealed as to why this had not come out before, (even Sarek didn't want to go into why it was coming out now, at least, not in public) At this point, Sarek was forced to abruptly switch his ire from his son to his son's delinquent teacher.

The teacher was reprimanded. Spock's work load in mathematics was doubled, on the theory that this would then keep him out of trouble. Since Spock had suspected this potential outcome, he had deliberately not taken all the levels he was truly competent in. His added workload was therefore still far short of his abilities and no strain or punishment for him at all.

And Sarek had merely lost most of a day's work. Not to mention dealing with the strain of maintaining perfect control, when there were really so many people who deserved at least a little of all that pent up Vulcan emotion, in spite of the target never staying quite fixed enough for him to express even a restrained version of it.

This really is why I try to spare Sarek as much as possible from these unpleasant scenes. They just wear him out. Spock just wears him out. Being human, I'm more flexible. Plus I have more options as to discipline. I don't hesitate to swat if the occasion really demands it. Because with Spock, one can never really win. The best you can attain is a sort of unequal draw.

But a Vulcan really **can't** swat his child. However much said child's human mother believes a sound spanking might do just the trick when patient logic fails. And a Vulcan certainly can't spank his son for being smarter than anyone really ever suspected, which was the case here. The human mother, however, has no qualms of conscience over a well placed swat for a child too smart for his own good.

And for a Vulcan there's really is no release for all that emotion. It's a terrible strain to a Vulcan's control, not to mention the Vulcan heart. That's another reason I believe in the occasional sound spanking. I don't want my husband to end up a benjisidrine junkie in his old age.

However, lightyears away, my options were limited. I wasted no time getting back to Spock and warning him he'd just forfeited his copies of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass **and** Flatland for the next year. And that included both his actual copies as well as eidetic recall. I didn't get any answer back. Which I suspected meant he was sulking.

I had yet to even address the issue of his absconding with my professional wardrobe, which I had to replace on Rigel. Though I had to admit to myself that the _Vulcan is here_ T-shirt made an awfully nice nightgown. It had come in handy because, out of force of habit (my husband has a Vulcan – or perhaps it's only a male - prejudice against nightgowns and I didn't own any) I had forgotten to pack one.

Still, I warned Spock he had better be good, no, not just good, but **excellent**. Or there would be hell to pay when I came home.

Stubborn silence was the only answer to this message. I sent a silent prayer to Sarek, and tried once more to banish Vulcan from my mind.

I paid more attention to the lectures in the afternoon sessions, since it was clear to me I still had a lot to learn about alien interactions. I got two more job offers, but some of the fun had gone out of receiving them. Later that evening we had an awards dinner. Though given the situation at home, it seemed rather hypocritical to accept any tributes regarding my superior understandings of alien systems. But I accepted some silly plaques attesting to the fact. I had forgotten to put in for a special vegetarian meal, and being human, I wasn't automatically delivered a special vegetarian one that my quasi-Vulcan existence usually defined for me. But the usual rubber chicken served at banquets is always revolting, and I wasn't inclined to eat it, even though it sat, striving pathetically to tempt me, on my plate. I filled up on salad and bread. The Andorian next to me was a carnivore entirely, and his nostrils flared at my untouched chicken. We exchanged a glance, then exchanged plates, my main course for his dessert. I had thought to console myself with two helpings of some frozen concoction with some stiff substance that tried to masquerade as whipped cream on top of it, but it defeated me after a few bites. I tried not to think of home, where you might not be sinking your molars into animal flesh, but at least what you were eating was real food, that grew up out of our own desert sands, food that both smelled and tasted. How did humans live on this reconstituted mush? At the moment, I'd trade it all for the woodiest of old plomeeks.

I didn't like to think I was getting homesick. Not on the very first day.

I stayed around for the reception afterwards, and tried to avoid thinking of home, but worry stayed at the back of my mind like a sore tooth. When I finally gave in, went back to my room and checked my messages, I discovered that Spock had not replied. That worried me even more. A truculent Spock was not one I felt comfortable turning my back on. There was still no word from Sarek, but that didn't mean anything. He would be as unlikely to tell me bad news as good.

After some thought I dammed the credits, and put in a subspace call home. There was no answer. I checked my computer, in case my calculations as to time and date were off. But they weren't. It was early evening on Vulcan. Sarek should definitely be home. Spock should be preparing for bed. Someone ought to be answering. But no one did.

With a feeling of foreboding, I put a call through to Sarek's Council office. After a short discussion with an officious attendant, who tried to put me off as if I were some silly human wife interrupting his work – "I'm calling from subspace!" I insisted, waving my arms in a way that probably suggested to him I was insane, I managed to get through to my husband.

"Why aren't you home?" I asked him, in lieu of greeting.

"Amanda?" Sarek sounded bemused. "Is something wrong?"

"I suppose anything could be," I said dubiously. "That's why I'm calling. Why aren't you home?"

Sarek paused for a moment, choosing his words. "There was an…issue…today that prevented me from accomplishing some necessary tasks. That delayed me in my work. Therefore, I have a few more things to accomplish before returning home."

I bit my lip lest I confess I knew all about what **issue** had interrupted his workday.

"Is Spock with you?" I asked hopefully.

"Certainly not. At this time, he should be in bed."

"But how can you leave Spock home alone?"

The video finally established, showing me Sarek raising a patient brow. "My wife, Spock has survived ten days in the desert, unassisted. A few hours at home unsuper-"

"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked, a little wildly.

"He is well able to procure a meal and put himself to bed," Sarek continued.

"Is that what he told you he was doing?" I asked hopefully. Perhaps I was wrong in reading too much into my son's silence. "Did you **check** on him?"

"I did," Sarek said calmly. "Other than leaving the kitchen a little disordered after his meal, he reported no other issues."

My heart was in my throat at these words. My kitchen. My beautiful kitchen. It took me a few tries to answer Sarek. All that excess oxygen seemed to have deserted my lungs when I needed it most. But somehow I found my voice and finally got the words out. "Sarek," I barely whispered. I cleared my throat and tried again for more volume. "Sarek. Please tell me. Was the video **on** when you spoke to him?"

A faint line crossed his brow. "No."

"You didn't see **anything**?" I persisted. "He left the video entirely off when you were speaking to him? You didn't find that…unusual?"

"No," he said, still clueless. "It was a brief exchange. Why should that have any relevance?"

I looked over the vidphone screen, my lips moving absently, mentally calculating the cost of a new kitchen against the cost of my trip. Divided by a few worthless award plaques. Multiplied by a child determined to get his parents' attention one way or another. "Sarek. Think. This is Spock. Your son. If he said, if he actually **admitted** to leaving the kitchen slightly **disordered**, what does that really mean?"

Sarek's eyes widened slightly.

"I'll tell you," I went on hotly. "What he meant was that he dismantled all of it, burned half of it, and disposed the rest of it somewhere out in the desert where it will never be found. You should have insisted he turn the video on!"

For a moment Sarek said nothing, going through mental calculations of his own, testing my hypothesis against what he knew of Spock. I could see in his eyes he'd belatedly reached the same conclusions I had. True to the style of a clan leader, he didn't hesitate. "Why did we choose to have a child?" he demanded of me, bypassing inconsequentials to address the true heart of the issue before us.

"**You** wanted to have someone to follow in your Vulcan footsteps," I reminded him. "And he's doing an excellent job."

"I will deal with him," Sarek said grimly, "When I return home."

"If there is a Fortress left by then," I said morosely. "It may never have been conquered before, but I think it has finally found its match." Then I reached out to him, half forgetting we were talking over a subspace link. "Sarek, don't …over-react. I mean, it is," I sighed a little in wistful remembrance, "only a kitchen. I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it. He just got curious and things got…out of hand. He is only seven."

"If even half of what we suspect is true," Sarek said, reaching to cut off the linkage. "He will be a fortunate child to reach the age of eight."

_To be continued…._


	6. Chapter 6

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 6**

I was at a cocktail party, glass of champagne in hand, deep in a discussion of Thelessian cryptographs, when it hit me like a wave of ice. I faltered in mid sentence, my train of thought gone.

"Dr. Grayson? Are you all right?"

"Too much champagne I guess," I said, smiling weakly. It was a clumsy excuse, since the reception had barely begun and I hadn't downed half of even one. It was all the excuse I could think of.

"But- " My colleague looked from me to the nearly full glass I was shakily setting down.

"Excuse me," I said.

I fled into the Ladies Room, waved down the glaring lights, locked myself in a stall, and put my fingers to my temples, sick at the feelings overwhelming me:

_An image recalled from a fairy tale: visions of ice, of bitter blasting winds, Hansel and Gretel turned out in the snow in fifteenth century Germany, starving and lost and alone…_

_Mother!_

My knees went out from under me as the cry filled my mind. I barely had enough presence of self, awareness of my own body to turn and lean over the bowl Then, everything I'd eaten at that tedious awards dinner, I threw up into the toilet.

_Mother…._

I drew a shuddering breath, fighting as if for air. My eyes were open, then closed, but it didn't matter. I couldn't say what I could see. I had never felt this bond, this strongly before. My hands reached out, instinctively seeking to comfort, closing my child against me: small, warm. Crying without tears.

_Mother…._

_Oh, my son…._

Bright lights stabbed my eyes "Did you hear what Andros said!" a high crystalline voice asked, and another laughed in return. Two women had entered the room, bringing a burst of talk from the outside conference.

And the feelings were gone. Like a light being turned off by a switch. I came back to myself, staring at the gray stall wall just feet in front of me, realizing I was sitting on the toilet stall floor, arms cradled around nothing, my mouth sour and my gown crumpled underneath me on the less than clean surface, shivering from a cold that was not in the least physical, but was all the association my mind could relate to these feelings.

The two women exited the room, never having noticed me. It was quiet, silent again. I reached out with my mind, but I was not a strong telepath. There was nothing. Not from Spock, not even from Sarek. Nothing. I was sitting on the floor of a toilet stall in a party gown. With all five senses grounded in firm reality. And the realization I must look like a fool.

Then a faint fading image returned. Hansel and Gretel, lost in the snow. And the thought: _at least they had each other. And I'm all alone…._

"Oh, Spock," I whispered.

I leaned my head on my folded arms, teeth clenched around my thumb's knuckle, to keep me from sobbing outright. And for the moment I didn't care if the entire conference saw me shivering there.

I abandoned the reception for the shelter of my room.

Sarek did not answer at the Fortress. He was undoubtedly home, probably out on the parapets, star field before him, meditating. I left him a message, brief and accusatory.

"_What did you do?"_

I showered, brushed my teeth, dressed in my _Vulcan is here_ T-shirt, warmed a little by the thought of Spock buying it for me. Flipped unseeing through the conference proceedings. I was half dozing when there was a beep from my terminal signaling message received. Sarek had not bothered with subspace. His answer was as terse.

"_I arranged for a contractor, as we discussed."_

So what we had surmised was true. And the damage had been bad enough that Sarek had a right to be displeased. But he hadn't answered my real question, and he knew it.

"_What did you do?" _I sent again, a preemptory demand, effectively too late.

The answer came back almost immediately. Sarek must be in front of the terminal in his downstairs study office. I could see him there, the starlight laying patterns though the long windows across the gray stone floors.

"_I disciplined him."_

I stared at the three words, starkly displayed on the terminal screen. I could almost see Sarek sitting before his own terminal, staring at the same three words he had sent. But my focus shifted, eyes unseeing. The fingers of one hand clenched reflexively, my thumb rubbing against my palm.

I flipped off the terminal

There was nothing more I could say to Sarek. I was as lost for words as he was. No wonder he hadn't called. At the moment, we were both defeated.

And he had a right to discipline Spock. Even an obligation. We couldn't let our son grow up into a juvenile delinquent, doing as he pleased. Had I been home, I might have, probably **would** have, taken matters into my own hands, not waiting for Sarek to return from Council. For something like this, destructive to our home, dangerous to himself, I would have spanked him. He deserved a spanking.

But Vulcans don't spank.

As a general rule, both Sarek and I started first with withdrawing privileges, adding unpleasant duties. Not that any of these was terribly effective for our stubborn child.

As a last resort, when something serious was called for, Vulcan parents punished by withdrawing the parental bond.

I had rarely done this. I could do it. I knew how. Human though I was, I even had the mental skills. But I could almost never bring myself to it. However much Sarek disapproved of my laying hands on our son, considering it a barbaric, violent act, which had no place in a Vulcan home, when it came to this sort of extreme, I'd rather spank. **Spock** would rather that I spank him..

Vulcan methods didn't take much. It didn't take long. A few seconds. A few moments during which a parent shielded against that deep subconscious parental bond. A tiny infinitesimal moment of resounding silence that effectively stated: _"I do not see you. I do not care for you. You are not my child. You are __**outcast**__."_

Hansel and Gretel, turned out in the snow. You bet I would rather spank.

I don't know how other Vulcan children reacted. But it was devastating to Spock. He was too Vulcanly sensitive a telepath, much more than Sarek ever was. Than I think Sarek could even imagine. And Spock was perhaps too emotionally vulnerable, a legacy from his human mother. For him it was like being shoved into ice water, deprived of oxygen, gravity. A freezing, burning cold without reference points, without life, without light.

_Abandoned. Turned away…. Forever lost…_

No wonder he'd scrambled desperately across the light years between us to reach me.

I should have shielded against him too, reinforced Sarek's discipline. It was the role I was supposed to play. But I couldn't. I wouldn't. No more than I could use that form of punishment myself. Once or twice had been enough for me before I saw the emotional affects it engendered in my son.

Still, it was devastatingly effective. Like all Vulcan measures.

As much as I hated it, I couldn't blame Sarek for taking that step. He had to do something. He couldn't let this go. Spock had gone beyond extra lessons, or tedious chores. And it was traditional.

I understood why Spock was acting out. It didn't require any great Freudian analysis. He felt abandoned by me, upset over my leaving both him and his father for the first time in his life. He was testing Sarek. Even negative attention was better, in his mind, than no attention. Though the punishment had emotional consequences for Spock that Sarek would not intuitively consider, based in human emotion as they were.

But as much as I understood Spock's feelings, I appreciated Sarek's position too. Sarek and I often had to leave Vulcan, leave Spock in the care of others. We couldn't have him burning down the planet just to get us to return, or stealing a Starship to come after us. He had to be taught, one way or another, that those tactics had consequences. That he could permanently lose more than he could temporarily gain. He couldn't always have his way.

Though given he was as stubborn and as strong-willed as Sarek, I wondered how effective even Vulcan disciplines could be.

Still, we couldn't have him stealing starships at thirty, now could we?

Could we?

Time would tell…

_To be continued… _


	7. Chapter 7

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 7**

In spite of passing a sleepless night, I had to get up early the next morning to chair a breakfast panel. I was brushing out my hair, wishing I could just cut it off, when the communications unit chimed. I looked at it for a moment, half steeling myself, then pressed the connect button.

Sarek's face swam into focus on the screen.

"What's happened now?" I asked, girding myself for the worst.

"Nothing more. Yet." Sarek temporized, precise as always, even in the face of potential offspring disaster.

"Oh." I drew a relieved breath and eyed Sarek curiously. "Then hi."

He didn't answer, declining to engage in such small talk.

I grew suspicious. "Why are you calling me live over subspace if nothing is going on?"

"You didn't answer me."

I sighed a little and put down my hairbrush. "You didn't have much to say, yourself. You never told me what happened. Or sought my input before you… did what you did. What was there for me to say?"

"**That** has never stopped you, my wife. You are usually quite verbose when you are angry."

"How did you know I was angry?"

He tilted his head and raised his brows slightly. I suppose that meant it was obvious to him. He must have felt it through the bond.

I sighed. "You're right. I was furious."

"But no longer?" he asked.

I met his eyes pensively, and propping up an elbow, put my chin in my hand, learning forward toward the terminal. "Sarek. I've had some time to think."

Sarek's lips twitched, just barely. "You were not thinking before?"

I shook my head. "Don't be insulting. That boy…he can get under my skin like nobody else. Well," I temporized, eyeing my husband speculatively. "**Almost** nobody else."

"That was the bond," Sarek said seriously. "You should have shielded against him."

I drew back, hurt. "I couldn't do that, Sarek. He was so…devastated."

Sarek raised an ironic brow. "You did not see the kitchen. And I think you are still being emotional now. Those maternal instincts you have mentioned before."

"He **was** devastated," I insisted, growing frustrated and impatient. "And don't mock my maternal instincts. And how do you know anyway? You were shielding. You don't know **what** he was feeling."

"Then the discipline was doubly needed. It is well past time that child learns to **control** his emotional reactions. Not foist them on others. It is the Vulcan Way."

I refrained, just barely, from rolling my eyes at this pious reference. "He's seven!"

"Quite. He's been training in the disciplines for four years now. And reasonably proficiently, according to his tutors."

"Oh Sarek. There's a difference between academic exercises and personal experience."

"Amanda, the discipline he received was not **nearly** what his actions merited. And well within his capabilities to control."

"It wasn't," I said stubbornly.

Sarek shook his head. "Two point four seconds. Far below the level of what is considered minimum even for a five year old. Given the circumstances, and in part because I made some allowance for your absence, I was **more** than lenient.

"But Spock **feels** things more. He was really upset."

"So upset that he was sound asleep an hour later? I did check," he said, raising a telling brow. "Lest he do something even more reprehensible."

I blew out a breath. "Then he got control of his emotions. He can't **win** with you. I can't win with you either. If he feels things too strongly, you say he needs to learn control. When he learns control, you discount the human side of his heritage. Where do I fit in with all this?"

"I don't discount that he played you, Amanda."

I drew up at that. "Oh, no." I shook my head. "Sarek. He wouldn't."

"He certainly had attempted to play me. What he did that morning? At school? You know about that, of course? And not from Spock."

I blushed but nodded. "I heard."

"My wife and her academic connections," Sarek said, faintly amused. "Are you suggesting that his actions were not deliberately provocative? That they were not **intended** to create dissention and turmoil? In violation of all Vulcan precepts."

I was well and truly caught there. "No. I don't deny it. But it is my fault he didn't bring up the issue with his tutor from the beginning."

"I'm well aware of that."

I bit my lip. "I do agree that he deliberately chose to create a scene in the worst way when our original intention was to avoid one." I shook my head, frustrated. "What do you want me to say, Sarek? He must have just been trying to get your attention."

"Precisely. However, there is a limit to the type of attention I will accord to such actions."

"Maybe if you had given him more **positive** attentions," I began hotly.

Sarek shook his head, forestalling me. "I had made arrangements to tutor him in computers last evening. He knew that. It still did not stop him. His behavior at school compromised those plans."

"When then maybe he was also trying to get **my** attention," I said. "I'm the one who left."

"Perhaps. Probably. I do not entirely understand his motivations, emotionally based as they are. And he had nothing to say for his actions. That motivation may explain why he is using emotional tactics. But it is not his place to dictate your actions."

"Sarek, I'm not disagreeing that you had to punish him. I just hate that form of discipline. I would have punished him too. In fact, if I had been home he would have been eating his dinner standing up."

"**That** discipline I do not approve of, as you well know."

"It's just an expression. He's never really hurt."

"How do you know?" Sarek asked with an ironic brow. "**You** are not a small Vulcan child, abused by his human parent's violent physical actions."

I flushed at this turning of the accusational tables on me. "That's not funny."

"It would be the prevailing Vulcan view. I am merely pointing out that your disciplinary methods are as unsuitable to my view as mine are to yours."

"You know I hardly ever spank. Only when he is really naughty in some dangerous way."

"That is precisely what I believe regarding such discipline as I administered."

"So he's doing this because…" I hesitated. "He just wants me home."

"As do I, for that matter. But neither he nor I are undisciplined two year olds. He will have to learn to handle your absence with at least some fraction of the composure his father is evidencing."

In spite of the circumstances, I had to smile. "So **you** miss me too?"

Sarek said nothing for a moment. He did not smile back, not even that fractional expression he used to answered mine. Then he said. "Your actions are untraditional. It requires… some adjustment on my part to accommodate them. However, I am managing it."

No, he was definitely not amused. "This is the 23rd century, not pre-Reform Vulcan. I may be light-years away, but I could hop a starship and be home tomorrow."

Sarek shifted slightly, as if my mentioning the distance away from Vulcan made him uncomfortable. "I would prefer not to discuss this."

"You miss me." I prodded.

"That is not quite the word I would choose," Sarek said, with quiet intent, refusing to be drawn. "I would rather say your actions, by Vulcan tradition, are…misplaced."

He was entirely serious. I thought about that for a moment. "Maybe Spock is acting out what **you** feel," I ventured. "You don't like my being away. And you are his principle role model. He might sense what you feel. All his tutors say he's an exceptionally sensitive telepath."

He drew up fractionally at that. "I do not **feel**. Not do I react emotionally. I accept facts. You are gone. You will return."

I sighed in frustration. "With such expressions of undying affection, I can't understand why I'm not rushing homeward now. But I'll tell you a secret," I said, learning forward to the terminal, quasi confidentially. "I **was** happy for about 18 hours. But in spite of my delinquent son and my oh-so-undemonstrative husband who doesn't **feel **anything for me, I have been getting increasingly homesick."

"Homesick," he repeated thoughtfully, as if tasting the word.

I nodded.

"For Vulcan," he added.

"Where else?" I asked.

Sarek looked over my shoulder for a moment. In spite of the blank expression on his face, I knew that look meant he was masking his emotions. Or calculating something. After only a second or two, his eyes met mine. Decisive. Determined. "Come home then. Now."

"I will. In two days."

He gave me a direct look. "You went away because you thought it would make you happy. You said as much. If you are not happy, then come home."

"That's not the **only** reason I went away," I countered, sitting back. "It's not even the principle reason. And I want to finish what I've started. I still have a presentation to give. I have **work**, Sarek."

He nodded, not without some regret. "Very well. I'll try to keep Spock from tearing the Fortress down, stone by stone until you do return.

"Give him my love," I said. At the expression on his face, I laughed. "You can pass on the message, can't you?"

"I can't approve such a message. I will pass on the sense of it, if not the vernacular."

"You can also tell him that I am going to have words with him over what he did to my kitchen. Which I almost hate to mention." I met Sarek's eyes. "It's very bad?"

He nodded. "Perhaps it's best you are not hurrying home."

"I loved that room," I said regretfully. "I had so many personal touches in it. Plants, cushions, artwork. Was there really a fire?"

"Yes. Between the smoke and the…other damage, you will have to replace those items."

"I guess I should commend you on your restraint for stopping after…what? Two point four seconds? Why two point four?"

He flicked a brow. "It was seventy percent of the recommendation for a five year old."

I shook my head at this bloodless calculation. "Why seventy? Why a five year old?"

"I adjusted for Spock's…emotional immaturity."

I shook my head, pensive, remembering Spock's distress. "I still don't think you got it right."

"Indeed." He raised a brow in challenge. "I am forced to be curious, even to a subject I find distasteful. By what basis, theory or formula, do you calculate your barbaric spankings?"

"Oh…" How do you explain something like that to a Vulcan? "I just swat him until it feels right."

Sarek brows lifted. "Until you feel right or he does?"

"It's…a combination. Sarek, I can't be so coldblooded. I can't quantify such a thing. I don't understand how **you** can."

"On the contrary, I do not believe one should react emotionally to a child's provocations as you do. It escalates emotional behavior when instead one should be imparting the need for control. One must calculate."

"I don't react emotionally. Not entirely."

"So you make a rational decision to strike a child you regard as beloved."

"In, part, yes."

Sarek shook his head. "Illogical."

"The very fact that I do love him makes the punishment all the more notable. I don't do it lightly. He knows to take my displeasure seriously. Anyway, **your** discipline hardly evoked control in him. He was really upset. He upset **me**."

"Also illogical. A child in a family is part of a larger sociological system. If a child acts in an anti-social manner, then the child should experience the consequences of **lacking** that society. However briefly. It is discipline based in logic and reason, as well as an allegory to a larger ethical precept. If one rejects proper society, one cannot join it."

"But he feels like you and Vulcan society are rejecting **him** for something he can't help. That discipline may be fine for full Vulcan children, but it can't be good for Spock, given he experiences so much of that in daily life. In fact, it's the **worst** thing you could do to him."

"His actions were entirely preventable. He chose his behavior. And he is not supposed to be feeling at all. He is supposed to be assimilating the analogous object lesson."

"But that's all he **does** is feel it!"

"Precisely why he must master control." He raised a brow. "I think you dislike the method purely because you yourself are outside so much of Vulcan society. And you react equivalently. Are you sure you are not imposing your emotional reactions onto him?"

"I don't think I am," I said darkly.

"Regardless, your method of discipline has no reason, no logic, no mastery. It is all emotion. It contaminates the entire philosophy that Spock is supposed to experience in the act of discipline."

"You think I'm making him worse." I accused, stricken.

"I certainly do not believe you do him any good. Clearly it has proved ineffective as a deterrent."

"Neither has yours proved effective."

"But yours can add no reason to his understanding. I believe you should conform to Vulcan methods of discipline. Where necessary."

I thought of Spock's reaction and shuddered. "I can't. I just can't do that Sarek."

"Then leave his discipline to me."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure I can do that either."

"Do you not trust me?"

I sighed. "Oh, of course I do. I **love** you. And that's more than trust. But I'm not sure I **understand** you. I know you don't understand me. Nor do I think you understand Spock."

"I understand his behavior is unacceptable. And must be addressed. Amanda," he said slowly. "He did this. Perhaps the …vandalism in the kitchen was an accident that got out of control, the expression of a curious, unsupervised child. But the morning's activities. That was no accident."

I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. "If he is misbehaving, courting punishment and conflict, knowing it will upset you, and perhaps bring me home early… But he's knows I'm coming home in a few more days."

"Perhaps he does not…believe it. Or wants to ensure it. I don't understand well enough to judge."

"Maybe we should talk to a child psychologist. Both of us."

"Amanda." Sarek looked grim. "Spock does not need emotional justification for why he is acting in an unacceptable manner. He does not need to have his emotional behavior validated and justified."

"Are you saying you want me to come home now?"

"I'm saying he needs discipline. Control."

I shook my head. "Obviously we have to do something. But I'm not sure you're entirely right. I just don't know, Sarek. I have to think about this some more." My personal organizer chimed a warning. "Darn. I've got this panel I have to participate in, though I'm feeling less like an authority every day. I can't cancel. We'll discuss this when I get home, all right? For now, please just keep a closer eye on him, so he doesn't have a **chance** to get into more trouble until we can figure this out."

"I will try."

"And I do love you, you know." I raised an ironic brow, Vulcan style. "I hope you don't mind my lacking control and discipline enough to say that."

Sarek sat back. "I am…rather fond of you as well, my wife," he said coolly.

I knew when I was being teased. "Words to warm my heart. I know should fall into a faint with the glow of it all, but I'll have to put it off till later. I'll call you tonight."

He nodded. "Until then."

I touched my fingers lightly to the screen, in goodbye, but it had faded and he was already gone.

I sat back. My personal organizer chimed again, giving me a five minute warning. I finished dressing automatically and slid on the conference badge with the ribbons denoting me as presenter, speaker, etc. etc. Picked up the conference materials listing me as Keynote, Nobel Laureate, Double Zi winner. All awards and academic credentials that felt like they had been given to entirely the wrong person. But I could hardly go out and say that. I'd just have to put a good face on it. Go out and fake it.

And hope Sarek could ride herd on our son singlehandedly. Or single-culturally. Until I got home and we could try and address our own personal Vulcan/human communication issues together.

_To be continued…_


	8. Chapter 8

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 8**

One thing about Vulcans. They are truthful to a fault.

I wasn't home when all this happened. But after Sarek turned up at Rigel, Spock in tow, I got the whole story out of him. I think he was more appalled than I was, almost shell shocked. And for a Vulcan, that is something.

After I went off to my panel session, Sarek made preparations for keeping a close eye on Spock for the next few days, until I returned. Knowing his schedule could be erratic, interrupted by legitimate emergencies, and no longer trusting Spock to be able to look after himself, he did the logical thing. He arranged for a babysitter, the daughter of one of his colleagues. She was finishing her final year in childhood education at the VSA, had experience teaching, and wanted to work for one of the prestigious boarding schools like those Spock attended when we were off planet. She had no siblings and believed that a little hands-on child care experience would look good on her resume. Sarek arranged for her to come that afternoon and stay until I returned.

Sarek hadn't asked me, but given the situation, I would have thought a live-in babysitter was an excellent idea. Certainly four hands are better than two in looking after a child like Spock. Not to mention that Sarek had not gotten great marks himself so far in the child care department.

His score was about to go drastically down.

He reported that Spock had been subdued when he came down that morning. I'm sure Sarek cobbled something together for breakfast. He took Spock directly to school himself, literally walked him into the building, and delivered him directly into the hands of his teacher.

So far, so good, right?

But when he picked Spock up at the end of the day, the headmaster again wanted to talk to Sarek.

"Your wife is away, Ambassador?" the educator asked delicately.

Sarek explained about the conference I was attending, and when I would return.

The headmaster nodded gravely, and then met Sarek's eyes. "I think it would be best if Spock remained at home until his mother returns."

"What has he done now?" Sarek asked.

"Nothing," the educator explained.

"Then what is the problem?" Sarek asked, somewhat testily. After all, he had had a hard past few days.

"That is the problem," the headmaster affirmed. "He has done nothing today."

Sarek said nothing for a moment, as the meaning of this sunk in. "He was disruptive?"

"Not at all. He went to his learning cubicle. He started the edugrams. But he did not respond. At first, the tutors and supervisors thought there was some mechanical or transmission failure that would explain why his responses were not being relayed back to the data banks for recording. But when they observed him, they noticed he was simply not answering."

"Did you ask him why?" Sarek ventured.

"We did. We thought perhaps he was ill. But he had no reply."

"He was insubordinate?"

"He simply had no reply at all. I am not sure if he actually…took in our questions, though I believed he heard us." Seeing Sarek was non-plussed, the headmaster hastened to assure him. "No doubt it is a temporary difficulty. But until he is able to make use of the facilities, there is little point in his attending school."

"I will see that he responds more appropriately tomorrow."

"Sarek," the headmaster forestalled him. "The child is far ahead of his peers and his age group. There is no doubt of his intelligence and no question of his falling behind. His instructors, and I, believe it would be better for him not to attend school, until his mother returns to Vulcan. Her absence appears to be a factor in his recent difficulties. Since she is due to return shortly, I suggest Spock take a few days to recuperate at home."

"I will let you know of my decision," Sarek said, and went to find his son.

He meant to question Spock, but one look at him and he decided to wait until they were out of the school proper. But Spock fell asleep in the aircar, and Sarek chose not to wake him until it was time for the evening meal.

Spock came downstairs, still drowsy from his nap. That is, until he was confronted with the young woman Sarek had hired to babysit, a task for which he had included preparing meals.

Even if Sarek had asked me, I wouldn't have cautioned him against hiring a babysitter, or housekeeper, or whatever. It was natural for Sarek, logical. He had always lived in a house surrounded by various attendants, until I had booted most of them out to have a more private family life. With me away, it only made sense for him to bring someone in.

But Sarek wasn't seeing the situation from Spock's eyes. Our son came face to face with this woman, who was dressed in a light Vulcan house shift and setting out a meal on the terrace, the kitchen being uninhabitable, on a table with three place settings.

Spock found the voice he had been lacking all day, and demanded of his father, "Who is **she**?"

"Her name is T'Vril," Sarek explained that she would be taking care of such things as I normally would have done.

There are times when Vulcans are particularly clueless. But, as I said, I wouldn't have thought twice about it either. Perhaps both Sarek and I were a bit inexperienced when it came to children. My only defense is that, occasional mischief aside, Spock really was a pretty mature, level headed kid. That was what made his next actions so unexpected. Now that I look back on it, of course it makes sense.

His mother had gone away. His father brings home a pretty young woman, a Vulcan woman, and tells him in so many words that she is going to be taking my place.

Of course Spock might have seen red. Or green as the case may be.

"No," Spock said, politely, but definitely and absolutely, in true Vulcan clan leader emphatic mode. "She is not."

And then, before Sarek had barely drawn breath to dissuade him of this notion, my husband had his first experience with a full blown, drawn out, super nova level childhood temper tantrum, one that by all reports, put any mere human style temper tantrums I had ever heard of in the pale. In Spock's defense, it was his first ever.

But he more than made up for lost time.

From Sarek's perspective, it was the last he ever intended to experience.

I always said Spock had a tendency to wear his father out. I just never realized how true that fact was. Or how far Spock could carry it.

_To be continued…_


	9. Chapter 9

**Small Talk**

**by**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 9**

Sarek hadn't warned me he was coming. It was mid-day of the second to last day of the conference. I was leaving the session where I had just given my academic presentation, surrounded by colleagues in the usual post-presentation congratulations, questioning and glad-handing, when someone next to me archly noted.

"Looks like we have a couple of conference crashers."

We all looked up and over. There, at the far edge of the lobby, stood two Vulcans, one short, one tall, definitely not wearing conference identification, scanning the crowds spilling out of the ballroom.

"Sarek?" I breathed, not quite believing my eyes.

I had said the name under my breath, but I had forgotten Vulcan hearing. I was shorter than most humans. They hadn't seen me up till now, surrounded as I was by the press of crowds, but that half muttered word was enough for my keen-eared child.

"Mother!" I heard him call, and then he was sprinting across the lobby.

It was a very unVulcan act. He hadn't greeted me this way since he was three or four. He realized his error half way across the room and paused, stricken. Threw a glance over his shoulder at his father, who taken unawares, still hadn't moved from his position against the wall.

Caught in the open sea of lobby between his properly waiting Vulcan father and his human mother, Spock hesitated, obviously torn between emotion and control. My eyes went from Spock's momentarily stricken face to Sarek's, carefully devoid of expression even in spite of seeing his son engage in this emotional display.

Were I a fully human mother, I would have bent down, opened my arms wide, and scooped up my child in a hug. But even with Spock hesitating, shifting from foot to foot, I couldn't forget Sarek, braced against the wall, his face set and tense. For the past four years, since Spock began his study of the logical disciplines, we all had become Vulcans, as best we could in our little family home. And as Vulcans, we didn't greet that way in public.

Or did we?

As if making a decision, Spock turned away from his father and ran the rest of the way to me on lightning feet. I had only the briefest chance to see Sarek lurch forward slightly, then stiffen, standing resolute, before I had to deal with Spock. He skidded to a stop before me, and the crowd of conference attendees surrounding me. His face was a study in contrasts, first open and eager, then controlled, shifting back and forth. Then he put his hands firmly behind his back in true Vulcan style as if to avoid temptation, not even risking a formal parental embrace, and said in clear Vulcanur, "Greetings, Mother."

I glanced again at Sarek, still frozen, no doubt appalled at even this partially restrained display of emotion. We all were making choices here. Sarek in his restraint, Spock in his deliberate run, and me? I knew what Sarek would want me to do, but I compromised too. I didn't scoop up my child and hug him as I would as if he were human. I didn't give him a formal Vulcan greeting in turn, as if I were Vulcan. I tilted my head in mild apology to Sarek and leaning down, touched my son lightly on the shoulder and brushed his cheek with my lips. "Greetings, my son," I returned in his language.

There was a Babel of voices around me, pleased and interested, as my colleagues regarded my virtually unknown son. Sarek and I had always been careful to conceal his identity as best we could. We worried about kidnapping, of course, but mostly we wanted to protect his privacy. Since he had started school at three, we no longer took him on diplomatic junkets. The press had calmed down since the early days of our marriage, so we didn't have to worry too much about press coverage at home. And any interstellar press who got too nosy and interested in a feature on our family life got their Vulcan visas terminated. So there hadn't been any pictures of him in the press for years. I could forgive my colleagues for their curiosity but I didn't want to let them indulge themselves too much.

"This is your son, Amanda?"

I nodded, smiled, avoided answers to any questions more personal than that, murmured excuses to my sharp eyed colleagues and put and arm around Spock to turn him back to his father. With Spock trailing triumphantly a step behind me, we went over to my husband. Every eye in the lobby was now on us, waiting to see how we greeted each other. I thought I was doing rather well, given the huge surprise their presence was. In one sense that made it easy to fall back into Vulcan discipline. I smiled slightly as I came up to Sarek, and held out two fingers in the only touch permissible between bondmates in public. "How nice to see you, my husband." I couldn't ask the real question uppermost in my mind, which was _What the hell are you two doing here?_

Sarek touched fingers, but dropped his hand quickly, as if he were reluctant to express even that much of affection before this throng. He did not unbend at all or return my faint smile. "We did not come to disrupt your schedule," Sarek said, stolidly overlooking the fact that every eye was on us. "I merely wanted to show Spock that you were here. Then I was going to find some other activity for us, until you were free."

Beside us Spock was looking from one to the other of us. He was not smiling either, but his aura was beaming as if he was the fairy godmother who had just reunited the Prince and Princess. His hands were still firmly clutched behind his back, but his chest was thrust out as if waiting for a medal to be pinned on it. Clearly he thought his hardships in bringing us together again had been a job well done.

"Everyone is going to lunch now," I said. "But we should go somewhere more private than the luncheon ballroom will be, to talk." I was sure Sarek had a story to tell me about why he was here. "Have you checked into the hotel?"

Sarek nodded. "I took a suite, one with private accommodations for Spock."

"Good. My room is large, but not that big. Why don't we go there and order room service," I looked from Sarek and Spock, "and you can tell me what's going on." I felt Spock suddenly edge closer to my side, all the while avoiding my eyes. "I'm sure it is a… fascinating story."

xxx

Fortunately, academic conferences take long lunches. We had two hours between the meal and the after lunch speeches, which fortunately I wasn't scheduled to participate in. They had hired a humorist. Not that Sarek couldn't have entertained the group with some whoppers, though of course they were not humorous to him.

After we had ordered and eaten a fairly large lunch, with Sarek and Spock demonstrating enough appetite to convince me neither one had had a decent meal since I had left, we sent Spock off to his adjoining room so that Sarek and I could talk in private, ostensibly so that Spock could take a nap. He didn't look like he had slept well.

"But you aren't going anywhere?" Spock sought to confirm before he left, a faint line between his brows.

I heard Sarek draw the barest impatient breath at this further breach of discipline, and hurriedly broke in before he could respond. I'd already forgotten how often I served as mediator in this way.

"I'm going back to the conference for a few hours this afternoon. But I'm going to sleep right here next to you."

That satisfied Spock. He went off with a full stomach and heavy eyes.

"He looks totally worn out," I said.

"He is not the one who deserves to be worn out," Sarek said.

"Well, you wouldn't appreciate it if I told you that **you** also look worn out. Although you do. How did you get here?"

"We came in the _Surak_."

That was Sarek's private flyer. With the warp sled on it was more than capable of traveling to the edge of the galaxy, though the quarters were too cramped to serve as more than a rapid transit vessel, with the smallest of private cabins. It was not like a starship, built to live in for months or years.

"I didn't mean how you got here," I said, though I made a mental note that my tickets home would be no longer necessary. No more smelly starship ride and reconstituted food for my return trip. "Why are you here?"

"It was necessary," Sarek said. He told me his sad tale, from Spock's lack of performance and banishment from school until I returned, to his stressed out sleeping in the aircar.

"I told you he was upset after your discipline," I said. "I bet he was just feigning sleep when you checked on him."

"If he was, I don't wish to know of it," Sarek said. "I have had enough of subterfuge."

"But that doesn't explain why you decided to uproot and come here. I'd be home in two more days."

So Sarek told me all about the great housekeeper misunderstanding and the tantrum that followed.

"You neck pinched my only child?" I said, horrified to hear of Sarek's final, desperate resolution to that tantrum. "You could have killed him!"

"He is fortunate I retained enough control not to administer Tal-Shaya, rather than stopping at the neck pinch," Sarek said grimly. "I was beginning to seriously understand your predilection for violent disciplinary measures."

"But then you had him out like a light," I said, shaking my head in bemusement. "It still doesn't explain why you came **here**. What happened then?"

Sarek shook his head, human style, almost a shudder. He didn't continue for a moment.

"What?" I said.

"I had been meditating," Sarek continued. "Out on the parapets. I had **need** of mediation after that…tantrum."

"I'm sure you did."

"T'Vril **was** monitoring him in the event that he woke."

"She was in his room?" I asked.

Sarek flicked a brow in concurrence. "I could hardly leave him alone. You think that was unwise?"

I shrugged a shoulder, indicating I understood he hadn't had many options. "He was already upset, thinking you were replacing me with her."

"It was illogical of him to make such an outrageous assumption," Sarek said, with a trace of heat. "We are Vulcan."

I drew back a little. Spock had definitely gotten through his father's control. "So what happened?"

He drew a breath. "Spock woke. He broke away from T'Vril. He was looking through the house for me. He had gone first to my office on the ground floor. T'Vril came to tell me. And then Spock appeared on the parapets. He ran to me." He drew a breath, nostrils flared in memory. Vulcans have fully eidetic recall. For Sarek, recalling this event was almost as if it were happening all over again. "He was careless. I thought he was going to fly right over the parapet, that he was not going to stop. I was so…astonished at his behavior, I barely caught him in time."

I bit my lip but stayed silent, unwilling to disturb his reverie. Thinking of that infinitesimal jerk forward in Sarek's stance when Spock ran across the lobby and then, stopping abruptly, nearly stumbled up to my feet when he had greeted me hours before. So it wasn't only the emotionality of the act that had so distressed Sarek. That had caused him to barrier behind all this rigid control. It had reminded him of when Spock had run to him so impulsively on the parapet heights. Sarek must have been scared to death. I looked him over once more, and revised that assessment. He was still scared to death, and hiding it. Not too well from me, though admirably enough for the average human.

"He kept saying that we had to retrieve you. That you were lost. That you would never be found."

"He must have had a bad dream."

Sarek shook his head, not in negation but as if indicating he had no idea what could cause such an outburst. "I tried to …reassure him. But he refused to be calmed. He insisted that we had to go to you. To bring you home."

"You didn't neck pinch him again?" I asked, alarmed.

"Naturally not. I tried to use reason. I took him to my office. I showed him your itinerary. I showed him the calendar. I explained how soon you would return. He would not be …comforted, regardless of logical explanations. And that is not all."

"What else?"

"I had to – briefly—deal with a Council message. When I turned back, Spock was gone. I found him, in the hanger, attempting to take the _Surak_ to retrieve you."

"But he couldn't!"

"He tried. He understands the theory, naturally. He could have lifted at least up through Vulcan space, though I don't believe he understands warp speed navigation. But he had the impulse thrusters engaged and was attempting to set a course when I intercepted him." Sarek met my eyes. "After that, I did not believe we could go on another two days as we had been."

"There are those dungeons in the bowels of the Fortress," I said dubiously. "Now I can see how handy they might be."

"I would not trust even those," Sarek said, with a faint smile, relaxing a trifle. "T'Vril was of no assistance. Her presence had made the situation worse. The more I demanded that Spock consider the logic of the situation, the more control he lost. I did not wish to risk a full loss of his control, or further risk his life." Sarek looked away from me, gaze remote and closed off. Then he turned back and met my eyes. "So I told him we would leave in the morning."

"And here you are," I said. I was still amazed that Spock had swayed his logical father into performing this completely irrational act. Leave his work and his duty, take them both on a starship ride to Rigel. "I appreciate your coming. I'm sure it was …difficult…for you to accede to his illogical behavior."

"I did not think there was a choice," Sarek said. "Little as I wanted to reward such lack of discipline, it became obvious that he could not be restored to equanimity in your absence. I believe I risked loss of all his hard gained emotional controls, risked his serious injury, – and your ire should he hurt himself - even his rationality, if I chose to delay. He was past all logic. I could not predict what he might do. He was…inconsolable, Amanda."

I sighed. "I'm sorry, Sarek. I couldn't have predicted this either."

"This was Spock's doing, not yours."

I shook my head. "I had no idea he was so …dependent on me."

"How can that be true?" Sarek asked. At my look, he said, "He manages boarding school perfectly well when we are both away." He flicked a brow. "Perhaps he does not care to be parented by entirely Vulcan methods."

"Perhaps he just trusts that you will bring me back," I said.

Sarek raised a brow at that, and nodded in surmise. "Perhaps."

xxx

I was reluctant to leave Spock after this, but Sarek insisted that all his efforts with Spock were for nothing if I didn't continue my activities. So I went back to the conference. When Spock woke, Sarek planned to have him help shift my belongings from my smaller room to the suite. And then we would meet for dinner. There was a last event this evening, and then the closing sessions tomorrow. The conference was nearly over.

I had no more presentation duties remaining. All I had to do was sit in the audience like any other session attendee. In fact, we could have left now, but there hardly seemed any point in rushing off now that everyone was together. We would stay the night, give Spock a chance to uncramp his legs from the trip from Vulcan, and leave Rigel tomorrow afternoon for home.

At least knowing where they were and that they were all right gave me the chance to thoroughly concentrate on the remaining sessions. The arrival of my Vulcans, however, had stirred up the barely concealed interest of the nosier of my colleagues. Session break after session break, I fielded questions, veiled and not. It was a relief to find people who wanted to talk about science. Unfortunately some of them started up questions about research, only to quickly turn the topic to the one that seemed uppermost in curious minds. I was still smilingly charming as I turned the discussion tables as quickly as I could back to legitimate matters. I had thought all that interest in my marriage to Sarek had died down after all these years. But it appeared it had just gone dormant.

I had excused myself from one too persistent group at a breakout session with the expressed intent of getting myself a cup of tea, only to fall into a clutch of women with smiles on their faces, and determined curiosity in their eyes. I resigned myself to another few deflecting comments before I could politely get away again.

"You're little boy, Dr. Grayson. So charming."

"What an angel. And so cute, with those pixie ears," another chorused.

I smiled, thinking what Sarek would have to say about the ear comment. Not to mention the characterization. On the other hand, there were all manner of angels, some with less than sterling reputations. "Thank you."

"And your husband. My dear! So handsome. Why he could pose for the cover of some of those novels… **you** know." She smiled slyly.

I did know. My marrying Sarek had stirred a whole cottage industry of publications, from the amateur to the major publishing houses, of a kind of Vulcan/human romance novel that was as improbable as it was cloying. Invariably they showed a deeply bosomed girl on the cover, her hair down and loose in a manner in which no respectable Vulcan woman would wear it in public, usually clutching in a most unVulcan way the arm, neck or waist of a bare-chested Vulcan. If you shortened the longer curlier hair on the Vulcan's head, and subtracted some of the bosom from the girl, and squinted a little, you could almost take them for Sarek and myself. Or at least myself in my early twenties. "I'll be sure to tell him you think so," I said.

"I suppose those books aren't actually based on fact, are they?"

"The opposite, entirely," I assured her solemnly. "Sarek and I use them as guideposts for our marriage."

For a moment, their eyes widened, before they realized I was teasing them, and that they had gone too far, the woman who had asked me blushing scarlet.

The women fell to talking among themselves, while I stood on tiptoe, trying to see through the crowed for where the refreshments were and make my escape.

"You're still with Siegried?" one was saying to the other.

"Oh, no, my dear. He was **ages** ago."

"I thought you had a five year?"

"**He** wanted a five. We talked about it, and changed it to a three. But that didn't last more than eighteen months. Such a mess to get out of, these long term contracts." The woman waved her arm in a dismissive manner, as if shooing away insects. I'll never do that again. What about you, are you still with Wotan?"

"Dear, he was three husbands ago. It was just a yearly contract. I **never** do more than yearly contracts any longer."

"If you're not having children, I really don't see the point," another said.

"Anything longer is such a bore."

"I think yearly contracts are more civilized." The first claimed with a regal air of authority that in as much as it reminded me of T'Pau, caught my attention. "You can always **renew** them, at six month intervals, if you feel you must go on." She gazed placidly upon the group, having made her pronouncement. Her eyes met mine, "Well, of course **you** probably don't think so."

"I think they're civilization of a kind," I said diplomatically. "I suppose it is more civilized than **no** contract."

They chose to take this as taken as extremely witty, and everyone laughed.

"Of course, you'll still actually **married**?" One said. "**Really** married?"

I drew a breath, and smiled, "If you'll excuse me, I think I see-"

"Vulcans are so old-fashioned."

"Though that might be fun, actually," the first said. "The old fashioned thing. Just for a time, of course."

"Well, with a Vulcan, marriage would never be **boring**. Or are they?"

"Boring, no," I said with a smile, thinking that was a harmless enough comment with which to end the conversation. _And that's as much gossip as you get_, I thought, and prepared to make my break.

"I suppose it's not just a _mariage de covenance_," the first woman said, with deceptive casualness.

"She has a little boy," one pointed out.

"To have a child – and a full marriage - It must be really and truly a romance."

"But my dear, don't you find not having a short term contract more **complicated**. I mean, just getting out of it when you've **tired**-"

This was all getting a bit out of hand. "Excuse me," I said and stepped away, but emboldened, she of the yearly contracts took a step closer and clutched at my arm. "I've always wanted to know-" she began intensely, and then her eyes slid to a spot over my shoulder and she froze, struck dumb. I felt a familiar presence come up behind me. I didn't have to look over my shoulder to know who could engender that kind of a response from a mere moral human woman.

I smiled and drew a breath.

"Sarek, may I present Dr. Gia Arioso, Dr. Evaline Geer, Dr. Syuk Arimata, and Dr. May Brock."

He fixed each of the transfixed women with the frostiest of Vulcan stares. To the contractual one, who'd been on the verge of asking what no doubt had been an offensively personal question, he sketched the briefest of nods and said, in a voice that would have shattered deutronium, glaring at her hand on my arm, "Madam."

Nothing can be more chilling than a desert dwelling Vulcan in the chill of frigid disapproval. My colleague shivered as if she'd been blasted with winter ice and let go of my arm. The rest of them also took a step back, literally stumbling against others behind them in the press of the crowd, and hurriedly began consulting their conference programs and chatting about where the planned to go next.

I looked at Sarek over my shoulder, prepared to gave him a look, although subdued due to our current company, but enough to let him know I disapproved of his behavior – talk about using phaser weapons when a pop gun would do!

But Sarek hadn't relaxed his frigid stare. "My wife, I would have a word with you.

"Very well," I said smoothly, for the benefit of the fascinated women before us. I could have kicked Sarek in the ankle for his manner, but I was not about to be riled by either of them, husband or colleagues, before such an audience. I turned to my colleagues, "Later?"

They nodded, eyes now widely fixed on our backs, listening for unspoken messages. I was no telepath, but I could imagine them waiting with bated breath for whatever they could hear, or see. Or just imagine they'd seen.

We threaded through the crowd, it dissolving before Sarek as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. I had to hurry to keep caught up with him. He never turned; so that all I could see was his broad back, rigid in disapproval. My annoyance with Sarek grew. I put up with plenty in those diplomatic receptions. It wasn't too much to expect Sarek to at least be politely civil in return when he had to speak to my colleagues, however overly familiar their address. He had no good reason to return their presumptuous behavior with this much Vulcan highhandedness.

They both deserved a set down.

I had been half temped to give my colleagues something to talk about, that would also blast my husband's Vulcan demeanor – take his hand, for example, or whisper something close enough to him to make it look almost like a kiss. I can get mischievous sometimes when I get frustrated. Especially when such easy targets present themselves, as both of them had just done with me. I suppose Spock does get that from me.

But something in the set of Sarek's shoulders, the straightness of his back, had told me he was not at all in a playful mood. I couldn't hear if the group behind us had started a whispered conversation, but from the tension in Sarek's posture, which didn't lessen as we moved away, it seemed they had, and he disapproved. And then, as I said before, he practically rushed out of the breakout halls, and turned into one of the small meeting rooms, now empty and deserted.

I faced off against him as he turned. "Honestly, Sarek. Could you possibly have been more rude?" I complained. "What's wrong now? Don't tell me you lost Spock again. I thought you two were going to be shifting my things and checking me out of my old room."

"We were," Sarek said darkly. "Then Spock found these, and brought them to me."

He tossed the collection of formal job offers on the conference table before us, that collection of "love letters" as I had teasingly thought of them. Tickets to another half imagined life that I had chosen to save and enjoy for a few days before refusing.

I looked at them blankly. "They are job offers. What of them?"

"Job offers," Sarek repeated. "On Rigel. On Tellur. On Andor, On Memory Prime. On **Terra**," he said, as if that were the final straw. "**Terra**."

"I've gotten job offers before."

"And you have refused them. These clearly have **not** been refused."

"I've been busy."

"Why retain them? Why not refuse them immediately?"

"There is a procedure for these things..."

"A procedure." He stood before me rigid. Almost trembling. The room was Earth normal conditions, conference conditions – read very cold and clammy by Vulcan standards. For a moment, Sarek lost control enough that he actually shivered. Impatient, perhaps with himself, he crossed to the environmental controls of the room and adjusted them, so that a furnace of heat blasted into the room, turning it into a miniature oven. He stood by the air duct next to the controls a moment, as if warming himself. I bit my lip. Sarek had generally good physiological control. Still, he was like all Vulcans. He had much more difficulty adjusting to cool temperatures than hot, particularly when humidity was involved. Earth normal conditions were a severe trial to him. Invariably he needed a day or two to fully adjust his systems. I tried to make that excuse for his otherwise uncontrolled reaction.

"Sarek, what is wrong? They are just job offers. I was going to refuse them. I was just…holding onto them for a few days."

"Tell that to your son. He was most upset."

He wasn't the only one who was upset, was what I thought.

"And what was that **discussion** you were engaged in when I arrived," Sarek continued, fixing me with a glare.

"You were unbelievably rude," I countered in turn.

He turned to face me. "I said practically nothing."

"You didn't have to say a word to be rude. And don't tell me you don't know that _madam_ has **other** meanings, in English. I know only too well how precisely you choose your words. That was a particularly nasty slight, in Vulcanur."

"She deserved the appellation. Her questions and statements were disgustingly improper."

"_Autre_ _temps, autre moeurs_, my husband," I said, striving for some semblance of rationality in a discussion that seemed to be spilling out of control. "It has nothing to do with us."

"Did it not? The conversation seemed to have been taking a turn in that direction."

"And you didn't think I was about to deflect it?"

"No doubt you would have tried. And they would have continued to press."

"With your behavior, on arrival and afterwards, I'm sure you left them an even more interesting subject."

"They would have pursued it regardless."

"We could have helped them, turned them, to a less personal subject. **And** left in a less provocative way."

"Leaving was hardly the solution. Your hearing is not acute enough to have heard what they said after we left."

"What did you expect, after you added such fuel to their fire? And eavesdropping, however inadvertent, it not a pretty trait."

Sarek bridled at that. Being Vulcan in a human society, where everyone spoke too loud and miscalculated what Vulcan ears could hear, was to be perpetually eavesdropping, with or without intent. But to be accused of it by me rankled him. "Our names were mentioned so frequently, I could not be sure I wasn't being called back to return to the conversation."

"Small chance of your doing that, even if they had. Not the way you fled. You let yourself be the subject of gossip."

"I?" he snapped.

"Yes, you," I said, beginning to be angry in turn. "The way to deflect that kind of interest is to toss it off, not get all Vulcan haughty over it and give them even more to talk about. I was just thinking of a way to do that, when you walked up."

"The subjects you were engaged in are **never** to be discussed among Vulcans."

"To be strictly factual, my husband, until you arrived there **were** no Vulcans present."

"I am Vulcan. You are my wife."

I blew out a breath. "Oh, for the love of – Sarek, I have to straddle **both** sides of this equation, human and Vulcan society. That means treading a middle ground, sometimes. And if you're married to me, so do you." He gave me a look. "Yes, so do you! If I have to respect Vulcan traditions, you need to at least tolerate human ones at times when you are in my culture. Even those that offend your sensibilities."

"It is impossible to do both. They are at exact contradiction."

"You could try to compromise."

"Amanda," Sarek said, striving for patience, however ragged. "Vulcans do not compromise in this. It is impossible to compromise in this. There is no divorce in Vulcan culture. There are no contracts, yearly or otherwise. There is marriage. It is a bond for life. Or there is death. That is all."

"Death?" I drew back, shocked. "What do you mean death?"

Sarek looked at me, wordless for a moment.

Now familiarity doesn't always breed contempt, but it does breed familiarity. I knew there was something more going on here than idle conversations and job offers, even given Sarek's stint at babysitting had left him frazzled and short-tempered. I'm usually hiding amusement when Sarek's haughty Vulcan act causes mere humans - and some Vulcans - to quake in their boots. I have seen him do it so many times in the course of his diplomatic career that I've become largely immune to it.

But there are moments, perhaps even to women married to humans like themselves, when you look at the man – or in Sarek's case, not a human man, but a male – and you realize man or Vulcan, familiar though he may be, he is as alien to you as any male can sometimes be. In some respects we are all aliens to each other. A creature outside of you, separate from you, though still tied to you by vows or contracts or bonds of marriage. Long familiarity and shared history don't always provide a bridge. And that alienness, the sense of danger that is akin with any strangeness, of situations if not of people, can sometimes raise a little frisson of alarm inside you, make your hair stand on end. Make you take a mental step back, if not a physical one.

For me, I didn't move for a moment. I felt that sense of uncharacteristic strangeness hit me like a punch in the gut, an electric shock along my nerves, and my mouth went so dry I couldn't swallow. The absurdity of it touched me at the same time – this was Sarek, the love of my life, father of my darling child, usually so solicitous of my comfort that I had to be careful what I admired, lest it end up in my possession. Still the look behind his eyes was so unfamiliar to me; it created a sort of Kitty Fane/Painted Veil moment, which held me dumb until I shook it off by sheer force of will.

Sarek did not speak. He seemed caught on the cusp of some terrible dilemma himself. He was literally turning ashen with his efforts at control. He shivered again, violently. When I trembled myself, he turned away and tried to turn up the heat again. The environmental controls were set on maximum heat.

"This is no place for a private discussion," I ventured. "Let's go back to … where **did** you leave Spock?"

"In his room at our suite." Sarek said, very quietly, very evenly.

"Then let's go to ours. At least you can stop shivering there. You look ill."

"You are shivering yourself," he said, ignoring that I was not the one with the supposed perfect Vulcan control. "I am in perfect health."

"Well you look shattered. You have since you arrived. I worried that Spock was going to be too much for you. It seems I was right."

"It is not only Spock," Sarek said, fixing me with a look. "Who is at times too much for me."

"Let's get out of here first," I said warily. "We don't want to get walked in on by a few hundred conference attendees when the breakout session ends and people come to use this room."

When we got back to our suite, I checked via vidphone to spy on Spock. He was watching something on the Stellarvision. I assumed Sarek had set him some sort of education program. At least for the moment he was occupied and apparently content. I locked the connecting door between our rooms, and set the soundproofing, so that he couldn't overhear us or break in on what seemed like was going to be a drastic conversation. For good measure, I turned on some covering music. Then I turned back to Sarek.

"What the hell did you mean by death?"

Sarek turned two shades paler again, and moved away from where he had been fiddling with the environmental controls. "I…spoke out of turn."

"Too late for that. What did you mean?"

"Perhaps you should sit down."

"Oh for-" I sat, rather than argue. "So what did you mean?"

Sarek sat across from me. "I never wanted you to know of this. It did not seem relevant, for us. I refused to allow the healers who counseled you before our marriage to fully disclose it."

I drew an impatient breath. "What are you talking about?"

"Divorce."

"There **is** no divorce on Vulcan," I reminded him impatiently. "You told me that."

"I lied," Sarek said.

I stared at him, flabbergasted. I couldn't have been more shocked than if he had told me he could fly without wings. Not that Sarek wasn't capable of social lies, white lies, even carefully couched diplomatic dissembling. But I had never expected him to admit to ever lying to me. Not to me.

"Rather, I committed a sin of omission," Sarek continued. "There is no divorce on Vulcan, not as humans regard it."

"No, _'I thought it was for life, but the nice judge gave me a full pardon.'_" I said, striving to lighten the atmosphere. "I know that."

Sarek gave me a dark look. "That has never been amusing to me."

"I apologize. But you still haven't said what you omitted."

"There is no divorce on Vulcan. But there is the Challenge."

"The Challenge," I said dubiously. "What sort of challenge? Duels of logic? Plomeek pies at twenty paces?"

Sarek eyed me, unbending, refusing to be drawn. "You have seen the ceremonial weapons on my study wall."

I frowned, picturing the wall in my mind. "Those big monster blades? The ones I wanted you to take down in case Spock got to them?"

"He would never touch them. Especially now, that he is old enough to understand their purpose. Which you do not."

"What purpose?"

Sarek met my eyes, embarrassed, ashamed, but resolute. "A wife who wishes to leave her husband…. she obtains a challenger. It can be a rival, a …a lover, as you would term it, a competitor for her husband's affections. But that is a rare motivation in these days of logic. A pre-Reform anachronism. In modern times, it may be for some other perfectly logical reason. A means of obtaining more status, personal, economic, or clan. Even professional." He gave me a level look. "A woman who wishes to be freed hires a challenger. A professional combatant. He kills her husband. And then she is free. That is our divorce."

I stared at him, my mouth open. "You are making that up. Why would you tell me such a terrible lie?"

He met my gaze directly. "I am not."

"I don't believe you. You have never lied to me before. And now you tell me that you have, and you tell me this terrible story. Have you really lost your mind? This is the most insane thing I have ever heard of. And how could I have lived on Vulcan all these years **and** never heard of it? Explain that!"

"We do not speak of this among ourselves."

"What happens to the husbands?" I asked wildly. "They can't just disappear out of thin air, disappear from all society. Someone would **know** what happened to them."

"Of course. They are casualties."

"But someone must notice that they are gone. People don't just **disappear** without being accounted for."

"As I said, they are accounted for. As casualties. Of an unspecified fever."

My jaw dropped for a second time. Vulcans reported deaths on their newscasts like any society, if they were prominent enough. I had seen actuarial reports for the clan on Sarek's desk. Births, deaths, causes. I had asked him, more than once, about the occasional odd notation, in the news, in reports, of death from this "unspecified fever". It had worried me, married to a Vulcan as I was. 'Why don't they find out about this fever and cure it?' I would ask him, puzzled why after all these years on Vulcan a culture as technologically advanced as they were would still be reporting deaths from something unknown. Now, suddenly, all the pieces clicked into place. And something else. Women were occasional casualties of this unspecified fever too. It was much rarer than men, but I had seen that too. "I asked you about this, more than once. You would never tell me what the fever was."

"I wished to spare you. Indeed, I thought you must have guessed, must have known, and were, in true Vulcan fashion, sparing me by pretending not to acknowledge this truth. Just as we do not acknowledge it among ourselves. It is the popular fiction in our society. For there is only one fever that is unspecified, undiscussed, on Vulcan. It is the Blood Fever."

I shook my head, stunned, no longer in disbelief, but in acceptance that what he was telling me, was true, impossible as it seemed. It all fit. "You have lied to me. You have lied to me over and over and over again."

"Yes," Sarek said, moving forward, leaning across to me. "I lied. Perhaps it was wrong of me. But can you blame me? You who -"

"What?"

"You who believe Vulcans are so **civilized**." He said it as if it were a curse.

"Vulcans **are** one of the most civilized people in the galaxy. My god, Sarek, your culture doesn't allow for the hurting of a fly."

"You mistake us entirely. We are not civilized."

I sat back, unable to deny any further, only waiting to hear what he had to say.

"There is only a veneer of civilization. Thinly layered. One that we continually strive to maintain. And only as good as our control. You have never understood or accepted that no matter how I tried to tell you. And I hardly **wished** to shatter your ideals, which emulate so much of what we Vulcans wish to be. You are like a child yourself, believing in this fairy tale veneer. Look at how Spock is ostracized at school. How you, and other humans are regarded by Vulcans. Vulcans are warriors, barely controlled by a strict devotion to logic. The Blood Fever, the Challenge. They are the true Vulcan state. The rest is the fiction, our fairy tale, which we strive to spin into a reality. Much of the time we succeed. At times we do not."

I put my hand to my forehead, pushed back my hair, trying to take all this in. For a moment, he had convinced me, he was so serious. Then the reality of my past life returned and it still seemed too incredulous to be believed. "No. It can't be. Yes, some of it is beginning to fit, some things that puzzled me." I looked up at him. "But, Sarek, this is still… so impossible."

He sat down next to me. "You know of Vulcan biology. There are reasons for our ancient customs. This is the only way. I can show you in the ancient texts." He looked around, as if just realizing we were not at home. "Not here. None of this is in public records. It is a dark secret of Vulcan nature."

I grew angry again at that. "But don't you think that I had a right to know all this, that you had an obligation to tell me all this before you married me?"

Sarek lowered his head. "I know. But you had accepted Pon Far. The requirements of Vulcan biology. I could not bear; I could not bring myself to add yet another…nightmare to our marriage. I thought it would be … too much for you."

"You mean it was too much for you."

"Perhaps so."

"You may have been right." I said, raising my voice. "Sarek, how dare you? You kept me ignorant. Stupid. The Vulcan village idiot!"

"No," Sarek protested.

"And me," I shook my head. "I have the gall to pretend I understand anything about alien cultures! Winning awards for this supposed understanding. And all the while I don't know the least thing about my own marriage. I have been a joke. You have **made** me a joke!" I looked at him. "How – how could you treat me like this?"

"It was not meant in disrespect. I wished to protect you."

"By lying to me?"

He darkened. "I did not want to speak of Vulcan's secret shame. I had thought it would not apply to us, to our marriage. But what of you? What of these job offers? These discussions you had with strangers about marriage **contracts**. Is that not also a lie to the promises you made to me?"

"It was nothing. I didn't say I wanted such a thing. Most humans have marriage contracts now. Almost no one but ultra conservatives even **attempt** to marry for life."

"That is supposed to appease me?"

"They were curious."

"Curious about our marriage. How could you discuss something so private-?"

"I wasn't. Not really. Sarek, **none** of this is new. We've been scandal sheet fodder since before our marriage. I used to field these sorts of questions from reporters all the time, before we faded from the immediate headlines. Have you forgotten that? People **are** curious. Humans **do** gossip. They are not Vulcan. It meant nothing. Up until you got there and incited them by rudeness into something they could gossip about, it was mostly just small talk."

He stiffened. Looked at me. "Small talk?"

"Yes. 'How are you, where are you working these days, whom are you with?' All that is just small talk."

He had not moved. As still as stone. Even his voice was without any inflection. "You consider _whom are you with_ to be small talk? **Whom you are with**? How long you will stay married? That, to you, is small talk?"

"For humans, Sarek, yes, it can be. It often is."

"Small talk." He turned away from me, his shoulders rigid. For a long moment he did not speak. It was as if what I had said was beyond all Vulcan comprehension. He had no words.

"Sarek," I said, realizing the enormity, the huge gulf that had suddenly opened between us. "I didn't realize this would upset you. It's nothing we haven't encountered before. I didn't think of it so much in relation to **us**. It was entirely natural subject -"

"Natural?" He turned so swiftly, I stepped back. "You consider that a **natural** subject of conversation? A discussion about changing marriage partners every few months as if they were hands in a dance?"

I blinked at this. "Oh, no you don't. Don't you dare. I absolutely refuse to accept this…unreasonable censure. I am **not** the only one who mingles with humans socially. You do it too, as part of your job. Don't **tell** me that you haven't found yourself, at least at one point in your long career, in the middle of a group of **men** talking about **women**."

He blinked at that in turn. "To my astonishment, occasionally I have. Including comments pertaining to you."

"Complimentary, I hope."

His brow creased in more than puzzlement. In total loss of comprehension. "Amanda. That's hardly the point."

"It might be to me," I said, trying to lighten the dark mood of this conversation.

His eyes narrowed at this, to a Vulcan, tacit betrayal. "You wish strangers to make such personal comments about you?"

"It depends on how complimentary they are." Seeing him still look affronted, I sighed. "Oh, this is too much. I need time to take all this in. And this is no place for it, in the middle of a conference on Rigel. Can we please not take any of this so **seriously**? Take this up when we get home?"

"You don't take it seriously," he repeated slowly, in stolid disbelief. "After what I have just told you of Vulcan marriage dissolutions."

"I can hardly **believe** what you just told me," I said, still bitter over that. "How can you expect me to believe something so fantastic, so outrageous?"

"It is true."

"All **right**! It's true. So **what**!" I forced myself to calm down. Took a few deep breaths. "Sarek, I am not going to hire Rent-a-Lirpa to have someone cut off your head. Which I sincerely doubt really happens as you have portrayed it. Nevertheless, it would never apply to us. Difficult as you sometimes make this for me, I do love you."

"I trusted that love that you spoke of. That too is why I chose not to burden you with the knowledge of Challenge. You assured me your love was true. Now I find you are considering a life away from Vulcan, and that a marriage and it supposed love is something for which you can contract!"

"I do love you! And I am sorry you got upset at a little paparazzi type gossip. But that was not my doing. Sorry you found a few job offers I had been hoarding to daydream over, but that's all they meant to me. Still, perhaps to your eyes even that was wrong of me. But you were wrong not to tell me something you should have told me long ago. I will forgive you, if you will forgive me. Now, can we **please** just get over this?"

"You expect me to 'get over' that you do not take marriage seriously. That you would discuss…us… in public, casually-"

I drew an impatient breath. "I didn't bring up the conversation. They did. What did you expect me to do, when Gia asked me that question? Kick her in the ankle and say I hated her like poison? That would have made for gossip. No. Instead I smiled politely, and I nodded and I said virtually nothing. It's none of their business."

"You should have ended the conversation. At once."

"I was about to end the **subject**, rather than the conversation," I pointed out. "In a nicely politic way. Not insult her, give her a reason to gossip, lose your temper and then run away like **you** did."

"Vulcans never-."

"You did kick them in the ankle," I said. "Virtually speaking. And then leave. It was rude and provincial of you. You embarrassed me in public." I sat back and crossed my arms. "I can't take you anywhere."

He gave me a look. "We will never resolve this."

"This is **my** culture. Do I try to tell you what to do on Vulcan?"

"Constantly."

I would have laughed, but he clearly was long past being teased or amused. "I'm sorry. But I don't think I do it nearly as much as you do with me, whatever planet we're on. Here, though, you should take **my** advice. It's not a big deal, this time – these women aren't, say, political reporters. But they will talk. And if you react that way before some political reporter, or some scandal sheet rag, you **will** give them something to print."

His brow was still furrowed. "I'm not concerned about the press. That is not important."

"You should be. It affects your career, much more than mine."

"My career," he said, as if it was something inconsequential, the last thing on his mind.

"If you don't care to think of yourself, then think of it as affecting your work. Vulcan's status in the Federation. The ability to get your message across without personal distractions."

He was staring at me as if I were talking utter nonsense. But it was clear however confused he was, however I had thrown him with my attitude and comments, he had reached a decision about them. And he was not amused.

"Sarek?"

"It continually amazes - no. Shocks me. How little you understand," he said. "How little you regard me and my culture."

"This is **my** culture I'm talking about."

"You are my wife. Your culture is my culture now."

Now it was I staring at him, my mouth open. I looked at Sarek. He looked at me. Just as we both fell speechless, the music sequence I had set to play also finished. In the lull of all this silence, we heard it, a pounding, a thumping at the connecting door

"What can that be?" I asked.

Sarek looked at me, his mouth set in disapproval, but he walked over and hit the connecting door release.

Spock fell forward into the room. Behind him, on all four walls of the suite, a major battle was being enacted in stellar vision, a cacophony of explosions, fires, broken and bleeding bodies, death.

"What the-" I ran into the room, even as Sarek picked up our son from the floor. I looked frantically around the room, trying not to react to the impression of a major war being enacted around me, until I found the remote and turned off the movie. The four-D images bled from the walls, leaving them the same neutral color as in our own room.

"You gave him an unrestricted remote to Stellarvision?" I said, dropping the offending device on a low table. "Sarek, what the hell were you thinking?"

"I-" Sarek looked stunned. Clearly he hadn't been thinking at all. Nor would it have occurred to him. On Vulcan, there are broadcasted programs on major networks, just as in the rest of the Federation. But they are science, documentaries, news. Musical performances. Not the sort of violent, bloody, gory, entirely un-age appropriate material that is on ninety percent of broadcast networks in the Federation. Sarek never looked at Stellarvision, except for the rare occasional newsfeed. Even then he got most of his news data either from summaries prepared by Vulcan aides, or from me, when he wanted a human perspective. Sometimes we would listen to a concert on Vulcan, but we preferred live performances. To hand Spock a remote control probably seemed perfectly reasonable to Sarek, an offering of the usual sort of educational material one would find anywhere on Vulcan. But this was not Vulcan.

And Spock had grown up in a culture that revered all life, the least of plants, the smallest of insects. Every seed from our garden was saved for replanting. In spite of the genetic heritage I had given him, he was a Vulcan, born and bred to peace. He had carelessly flipped a channel when his program ended, perhaps he had not even had to flip a channel, and been transported into a 360 degree vision and full audio battle scene. He had no reference points for what he had been dropped into. He ran for the door, for his parents, and finding it locked, and himself trapped in a virtual war zone with everyone dying around him, had beaten on the panel until the door was battered and his hands were bloody.

Sarek had carried him to our bed. "Spock."

Our son was not exactly crying, his control had held, even in spite of this. Or perhaps he was in shock. But he was shivering and whimpering.

"Oh, Spock," I said coming back into the room and sitting on the edge of the bed beside Sarek. "I'm so sorry."

Spock flung himself in my arms. "I won't go back in there! I won't go back in there!"

"No," I said, holding him and trying to sooth him. "You don't have to."

Next to me, Sarek raised his fingers, steepled in Vulcan mediation, and then, as if giving up, lowering his brow into his hands and rubbed his temples in a gesture of weariness that could have been purely human.

He looked at me and I at him, while Spock sobbed in my arms.

_To be continued…_


	10. Chapter 10

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Chapter 10**

Sarek obtained a first aid kit from the hotel. We cleaned up Spock's bruised and bleeding hands. The door was a total loss. Now that it was open, we could no longer get it to close, but that hardly seemed important. Getting Spock past what happened to him was another matter. We soothed him, talked to him, read to him. We managed to get him to eat something. We put our own problems, our own arguments, out of our minds. When bedtime came around, Spock still froze and refused to go back into his room. Sarek tried to reason with him. Even when he went so far as to take Spock and walk beside him into the room, hand in hand, Spock wanted to comply. But then he would freeze on the threshold and run back out.

Sarek suggested we just switch rooms, but Spock grew wide-eyed over the prospect of being left alone.

"Give him a day, Sarek," I said, wearily. "Tomorrow we'll be leaving here."

So for the first time since Spock was an actual infant, we were preparing for bed with the intention of having Spock sleeping in our room with us. For Sarek it was hard to envision anything more improper than this breach of privacy. But even he understood Spock was too shattered to leave alone.

I dozed off beside Spock, while Sarek was still meditating. When I woke, he wasn't around. I eased out of bed careful not to wake Spock, who was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted. The broken connecting door to Spock's room was of course still open and a faint light showed through.

In the room, Sarek was sitting on the couch. Around him the panels of the Stellarvision showed nothing more than a view of colorful fish swimming in a coral reef. He had the audio turned completely off. He didn't look up as I entered. His gaze was just as vacant as if he were in meditation, but his pose, usually fairly rigid in meditation, was not indicative of that. Too tired to sleep perhaps, or even to continue to meditate. He didn't say anything when I approached, but his body language shifted slightly, enough to let me know he was not in trance and my presence did not intrude on his meditations.

I sat down next to him, put my hand in his, leaned against him. We watched the reef fish in silence for a long time. I could feel him sigh, just a little, and relax slightly.

"This doesn't seem like your type of mediation scene," I ventured finally. "Didn't they have a star view?"

"I didn't want a star view," Sarek said quietly.

I thought for a while. "I'm sorry I yelled at you. About the remote, I mean. You wouldn't have realized what he might have seen when he explored it. I should have reminded you of what kind of content to expect on a service like that. You never did watch much television, even on Terra."

"Terra," he said. "Our discussion on that was interrupted. It is past time we returned to it."

"What do you want to talk about?"

He turned slightly, to look at me. "That job offer from the Sorbonne. You made notations on the paper. Notations, Amanda. You were considering it."

"That's what you are really upset about, isn't it?"

He said nothing.

I bit my lip. "Oh, Sarek. That was just…daydreaming."

"You dream of Terra?" It wasn't really a question. But he seemed to be soliciting confirmation of that point.

"No," I said, flustered. "Not usually," I amended. Feeling his muscles tense slightly, feeling him withdraw a fraction, I tried to clarify. "I mean I **don't**. **Not** the way you are thinking."

Sarek turned back to the reef fish, his shoulders rigid. "You could have told me that you were unhappy."

"But I wasn't unhappy," I denied. "I'm **not** unhappy."

He looked at me sideways. "How can you not understand your own emotions?"

I put my face in my hands and rubbed my forehead. "Do we **have** to have this conversation now? I'm really not up to yet another explanation of the human versus non-human mind. Hard as it may be to believe, given the venue that we are in, I am feeling strangely disqualified to even **attempt** it."

"I think we must."

I sighed. "Sarek, I can still dream of Terra, even long to be there sometimes, and still choose Vulcan. And you."

He shook his head. Not in denial so much as his rejection of ever being able to understand such a contradictory attitude.

"Aren't you ever, even momentarily of two minds?" I asked. I had an inspiration. "Don't you ever wish, sometimes, that I'm Vulcan? As much trouble as I cause you?"

He gave me a look of utter disbelief. "Never. How can you think such a thing?" Then, as if a new concept struck him, he sat up and stared at me. "Do **you** wish that I were human?"

That was new concept for me, and I blinked. "Sarek, you could never **be** human. I can't even imagine you that way, and I certainly would never wish for it. But let's be honest. Sometimes I do get exasperated with Vulcan ways. You know that. I tell you so. Just as I know that you get exasperated with my human ones."

Sarek's gaze had settled back to the reef fish. "This is beside the point. You should have told me that you were unhappy."

"I'm - I don't know how to make you understand."

"Mother?" A faint call came from the other room.

"We're in here, Spock."

He appeared in the doorway. Sarek and I shifted apart the fraction necessary for Vulcan propriety.

"Come on in," I invited ruefully. "Nobody here but us Vulcans."

Spock looked suspiciously at the walls.

"We are too tired to budge, honey," I said. "Come on in. It is safe."

When Spock still hesitated, Sarek turned off the reef fish, and said "Come."

Spock waited until the walls faded to neutral blandness, then ran across the room as if his bare toes could hardly stand contact with the floor. He didn't hesitate, but slipped up onto the couch between his father and me and huddled there, shivering. Eyes still suspiciously regarding the surrounding walls.

"You don't need to be scared," I soothed. "It was just a movie."

"I'm not scared," Spock denied, without much force of conviction. He straightened up, and sat more normally. "But I'm cold," he claimed, saving face. "It's so cold here."

"Indeed. However, you are going to be yet colder still," Sarek said, looking across at us both. "I have decided that we are going to Terra."

Spock's eyes grew round as saucers.

When we had settled him back in bed, I castigated Sarek. "You should not have said that. I don't know whether he would want to go or not, but the very idea is out of the question for any of us. I have work. You have work."

"I cancelled it."

"My work? You cancelled my work? My classes? When? How?"

"I decided earlier this evening. When you and Spock were sleeping."

"Why? And how dare you?"

"I don't believe that you have left me a choice, Amanda."

I put my head in my hands again. "Sarek… Sarek, I have no idea what you are talking about, but I think it is based on a false understanding. What have you done? Because it's going to get undone very soon."

Sarek had reset the reef fish after I had gotten Spock back into our bed. He looked back at them endlessly swimming. "Do you remember where we stayed on vacation? Just before and after we were married? This has reminded me of that."

I looked from the walls to my usually logical husband. "You plan to move us half way across the galaxy based upon a decision triggered by a screensaver of reef fish? My logical husband, you are way overreacting."

He looked at me evenly. "You wish to go to Terra."

For a moment, I stared at him, flabbergasted at the accusation. "I don't think so. Even if I did entertain a few wild flights of fancy, that doesn't mean it's reasonable for either I or you to act upon them. Sarek, you cannot try to pull down the moon on my every whim. It's… it's illogical."

"That is not possible, as you well know. However, since you wish to go to Terra-"

I closed my eyes in impatience. "Save me from Vulcan dogmatism. And if we have to have this ridiculous discussion, could you at least, please, call it Earth? I mean, if you marry a human woman, you ought to at least know what name she calls her planet."

"Earth, then. If you wish to go to Earth, then we will go to Earth. All of us. Together."

I shook my head. "Sarek-"

"You wanted the job, Amanda." He looked at me, flat out and demanding.

I bit my lip and looked away for a long moment, flushing. "All right. Yes, I admit it. I wanted it. For a moment, for a while, yes. I wanted that job very much. In some respects, I still do."

"Without us."

"Oh, no," I denied, shaking my head. "There you don't understand. Not really."

He looked at me again. "You had in your mind to divorce yourself from me."

"No," I said, shocked. "**Never**. How can you think that?"

"In your heart. In your dreams, if nowhere else. Even if only for those moments that you considered it. You wished to be… free of all encumbrances." He looked at me, betrayed. "How can you call **this** the love that you have so often spoken of to me?"

I shook my head at him, realizing the gulf between us had not narrowed in all these years of marriage. Perhaps it had grown wider, now, with my new knowledge of Vulcans and Sarek's disappointment in me. "Humans are **not** Vulcans, Sarek. We can want…oh, all sorts of different things, so many, and so contradictory, and all at the same time. It doesn't mean I love you any less. Or want you less. It just means I'm human."

"Is that supposed to comfort me?" Sarek asked, astonished that I would consider this any sort of excuse.

"You could try to understand and respect the human mind. Just as I try to understand and respect Vulcan biology.

He looked away, well and truly caught by that. "I know you... try. But still I do not understand this…desire you speak of. Or how it can exist without impacting our marriage. There is logical evaluation. And there is emotional desire. **I** would never wish to be apart from you. Never. We are bonded, always and forever. There is not a moment that I do not wish that. But you have confessed, you have admitted, that this is not always true for you."

I thought about that, about my brief daydream fantasies of another life, and how they could, for me, coexist with my real life, for me without any contradiction. "Are you saying that Vulcans are never of two minds about anything? When we were stationed on Earth when we were first married, did you never long for Vulcan?"

"I am saying there is and was never a second that I would wish to be parted from you. You obviously do not feel the same. How am I to respond to that? How am I to regard this as anything but a …a prelude to Challenge?"

"I never even knew of Challenge!"

"You know now."

"There is absolutely no correlation between the two. Try to understand that humans can often be of two minds about things. And not just two, but a hundred minds about things. It's how our minds work, to consider so many things at once, to wish for them, to dream, even to hope a little. And we don't divorce emotion from reason when we consider all these things. Humans evaluate with emotion and reason mixed. We don't think like Vulcans. Evaluation aside, it's what we want most, consistently, that matters. That's what we make a decision on. That we choose to live by. I can consider other lives. I can even want them, briefly. But I chose and continue to choose you. And Spock. That is where my decisions are based and where my heart truly lies. It doesn't mean I love you less, am committed to you less, if I briefly long for something else. I am human, Sarek."

Sarek just shook his head, his eyes back on the fish. He looked baffled. And very weary. "I don't fully understand. I do understand your emotions are…quixotic. I do understand that you long for Earth. Very well. We will go there. All of us. Together. Perhaps a journey there will…ease your longing. And settle this question of the Sorbonne. If not, then we can discuss it further. If it does resolve it, then we can go home. But for now, we will do this, you and I, together. And since Spock obviously cannot be separated from us at this time, he will come too. All of us. Together." He said it as if it were a formula. One plus one equals two. And one more equals three.

I draw a breath to argue, and then deflated. I knew then, that this trip wasn't entirely for me. Vulcans allegedly denied their emotions, but I had never found them buried down too deeply. Scratch a Vulcan, and you may find a pre-Reform warrior not too far down below the surface. Even though Sarek meant this for me, he needed it too. This was his attempt to banish the specter of Terra, of a life apart from him that had risen between us, perhaps since I had first begun to speak of this conference. And had widened since when he saw the betraying scribbles I had written on that offer from the Sorbonne. Perhaps the smartest thing to do was to agree. Let him do this, and then put it behind us so we could go home.

"All right," I said, giving up. I laid my head on his shoulder and curled up against him just as Spock had done moments before. It **was** cold in the room, and he was a veritable Vulcan furnace. "One plus one plus one equals three. We'll go on vacation to Terra. And then we will go home."

He looked down at me. We were touching close enough that he could feel my emotional conviction, if not the exact tenor of my thoughts. And I always said none of my Vulcans could resist an equal sign. My formula reassured him. His hand closed around mine.

And for the first time since he had arrived on Rigel, his head bent to mine, and we kissed.

xxx

The next day, Spock crowded up between the pilot and co-pilot's consoles as the _Surak _burst out of warp in the outer confines of the Sol System: that human Mecca of the known galaxy. We hung as stationary as one can be in a moving galaxy, waiting for an impulse clearance path through the slower systems traffic.

Spock eyed the planet uneasily.

"That's a lot of water."

Sarek glanced at him at this imprecise statement. "Do you know nothing of Earth?"

"No. You haven't let me study it yet," Spock said calmly, staring avidly at the screen. A whole world before him to conquer.

"Touché," I said.

Sarek fixed me with a reproving look. But it was true. Sarek had wanted Spock thoroughly grounded, say indoctrinated rather, in Vulcan traditions in culture, a vaccination of sorts, before he ever exposed him to all those extra-Vulcan contaminants.

"I will set you up a study program while we are here."

"Some vacation," I commiserated for Spock.

"How does all that water not fall over and swallow the land?" Spock queried. "There is so much more of it than land."

"That is illogical. It is unworthy of you, Spock."

"The land is higher," I said. "It's simple gravity."

Spock flicked an eyebrow as if dubious that such a huge and treacherous body of water as Terra's seven seas could be restricted by simple laws of gravity. "Are there still monsters in the water?" he asked with morbid curiosity. "Sea monsters? Are they violent? Will they eat us?"

Sarek looked at Spock as if the child had grown two heads. I swallowed a smile. "He's thinking of fairy tales I read him long ago."

Sarek muttered something under his breath about human contamination. He had adamantly disapproved of my reading Spock fairy tales. We'd had quite a fight over that in our day.

"There are very large sea creatures in the oceans," I explained. "Some would eat people, if one got too close. We will not be that close to them. **We** will be perfectly safe."

Spock failed to look entirely convinced.

"It's hardly as dangerous as lematya hanging outside our very gates," I said tartly. "You never hear me complaining about that."

"But you do," Spock said.

"Frequently," Sarek agreed.

"It was a figure of speech."

"Illogical," both returned.

I drew a breath, reconsidered, and chose instead to drop the point. I knew when I could not win.

"That looks like a much more habitable planet," Spock said, pointing a finger at Mars, swinging by in a side viewscreen.

"It only looks a bit like Vulcan," I told him. "Mars is much colder than Terra. You will like Terra," I assured him.

Spock sighed a little and edged a fraction closer to his father. "They don't have Stellarvision?" he asked suddenly, in horrendous afterthought.

"I assure you, Spock," Sarek said grimly, "That if there is such a thing in the house, I will disable it."

"Nonsense," I said, for I had a hankering to perhaps watch an old movie or two. "This is a vacation after all. But you can only watch, Spock, what I allow you to watch. _Sesame Street_. If that is not too advanced for you."

Sarek gave me a dark look.

We finally got a docking clearance. Even though the _Surak_ could easily have come down to the surface on thrusters, Terran red tape did not allow any warp drive vehicles except authorized ones to enter the planetary atmosphere. And that extended even to the vehicles of renowned statesmen. We could have disengaged the warp sled, but instead Sarek docked the craft in a high security cradle that catered to diplomatic craft, next to others of the Vulcan delegation.

But we raised some eyebrows going through customs because Sarek and Spock had no more than a day's change of clothes to their names. And I had little more than that.

"You are planning to stay a month," the official said to Sarek, looking disbelievingly from our diplomatic passports to our meager belongings, "And this is your entire luggage?" His implication was somehow that we must be passing the rest of it, along with a lot of forbidden contraband, through diplomatic channels. He didn't have any recourse even if we had, but he clearly didn't like the notion.

"We're going native," Sarek said coolly, with a direct stare. "We will purchase what we need."

I choked back a laugh.

"Are we there yet?" asked Spock as he stared around at the gray metal walls of the customs center, in the whine of a bored child that as I mother I had found circumvents all species. "I am **hungry**."

We beamed down to Paris for a couple of days of shopping and sightseeing before heading to our rented house. Checked into the Connaught-Hilton. Spock went to the balcony and looked out at all the fairy lights in the gathering dusk. "This is Earth," he said, in so neutral a tone I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

"Yes."

"I thought I might remember it when I saw it again," he said pensively. "But I do not."

"You were only a baby. Do you like it?" I asked.

"What is all that water?" he asked, pointing. "Is that part of the ocean?"

"It is a river," I said. "One of the most famous on Terra. Perhaps this evening we'll take a walk along the banks when we go to dinner."

Spock looked dubious and unenthusiastic at the prospect. "Doesn't this planet have any deserts?" he asked. "Can't we live there?"

"Not if I have any choice in the matter," I said "I didn't come all the way to Terra to visit more deserts."

The sightseeing in Paris was not entirely a success. We took Spock to the top of the Eiffel Tower. He was flat out incredulous. In the wrong way.

"**This** is supposed to be a great tower?" he asked us, in Vulcanur. "This small thing?"

"Spock, on Terra, one speaks Federation Standard," Sarek reprimanded him. He had apparently decided to use the trip as a sort of educational introduction for Spock as to his future diplomatic career. "Or as we are in Paris, French. It is impolite to not speak the language of the environment one is in; if one can possibly do so."

"He doesn't **know** French." I said.

"I do too." We looked at him. "I went through a grammar/dictionary. Once," he said to his father, shrinking a little at Sarek's belated look of comprehension.

My husband and I met each other's eyes. I thought of all the times we had spoken French over our son's head, thinking he had not understood. Yes, I could see why the little monster had looked up the language.

"Speak French then," Sarek said apparently deciding the statue of limitations on that offense had long expired.

"This cannot be a great tower," Spock continued in reasonably accented Parisian French, relieved to have sidestepped that issue. "Not **this**. Even a small child, such as myself, can see there are very many buildings that are a great deal taller." He looked disparagingly at the Parisian landscape around us. "And **wider** too. And it doesn't have any sides on most of its height. Why on Vulcan, this would never be considered -"

"Speak Vulcanur," Sarek interrupted hastily, noting the unfriendly looks of some of the Frenchmen around us in response to this criticism.

"But you just told me to-"

"Never mind," Sarek said, continuing in his own language. "Spock, with your duties as a diplomat, you will be required to be…diplomatic. It is impolite to come to what is supposed to be a great and famous monument of a city and compare it unfavorably to Vulcan. These people are proud of their tower. However untowerlike it may seem, it is nevertheless an ancient monument that represents a significant accomplishment of its day. Therefore as Vulcans and diplomats, we must respect the **representation** of it as a tower," he gave me an apologetic look, "However small in stature it appears."

"But even **I** can see that around it-" Spock argued, and was abruptly cut off as Sarek, abandoning all Vulcan conventions, hauled him down from the not so very great heights of the Eiffel Tower.

xxx

We gave up sightseeing not long after that and moved down to the villa Sarek had rented. We ended up going back to the place where we first vacationed after our marriage. Honeymooned, if that word can even be used in relation to Sarek, where it seems too public an activity for even an amorous Vulcan who married a human outside of Pon Far. I'm not sure if Sarek was trying to please me, or if his imagination as regards what a vacation entailed was Vulcan limited. He rented the same villa, with its swatch of private beach. I had made it back to the Cote d'Azur after all.

If the heights of Terra's monumental towers were not a success with Spock, even the relatively mild waves of the sea did impress him, although not favorably. Apparently he'd never imagined that much water, growling and roaring and hissing like a lematya (though to me the waves seemed quite tame). We had walked out from the house onto the sand, Sarek visibly relaxing a bit more in the warmer air. Spock took one look as the waves rolled up and crashed down onto the beach, and high tailed it for the house, running up the stairs to the second floor and barricading himself behind the first bed he came to.

"It's coming in!" he said, as Sarek and I ran up the steps after him.

"It will not, Spock," Sarek said.

"It came after us," Spock insisted. "All that water. It rose up and it thrust itself forward and…it **attacked** us." He looked from one to the other of us accusingly. "I knew the land could not contain it. It was violent. It is probably full of predatory sea creatures. This is an undisciplined, uncivilized planet."

"They are waves," Sarek said, striving for sweet reason, while giving me a look that plainly accused me of all that this radical reading of human fairy tales to Vulcan children could lead to. "You understand wave action, in physics. The pull of the moon draws the waves up onto the beach, but then they are pulled back. There are high tides and low ties, depending on the moon, that will shift the height the water reaches. But the waves normally will not come more than a few feet further off the beach. It is not a sentient action. It did **not** come after you."

"It did," Spock said.

"It did not."

"The waves can never come up and envelop the house?" Spock asked.

Sarek was torn at this. He glanced at me, caught between the truth of tidal waves, cyclones, and other natural disasters, and not wanting to admit that truth and further distress Spock. "Not in normal circumstances, no."

"Normal circumstances," Spock said, rejecting that characterization with the Vulcan precision Sarek had trained into him. "This sea can therefore be very dangerous."

This effectively silenced Sarek. In all truth he could not deny that to his **own** Vulcan mind, so much water **was** dangerous.

"I knew it," Spock said, who understood his father well enough to realize that the lack of an immediate correction signaled he had been right after all. "Dangerous. The sea monsters **will** come. And they will eat us. Mother told me so. It was in the book."

"It is not dangerous," I said crossly. "No sea monsters will come. And the book was a fairy tale. Fiction."

"Now, with this evidence before you, perhaps you will acknowledge the **dangers** of exposing him further to illogical fiction," Sarek said, unable to resist this opportunity for an 'I told you so'. "Even _Alice in Wonderland_-"

I glared at my husband. _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking Glass_, full of logical allegories and mathematical jokes were Spock's two favorite books in the world. He owned the annotated version of them; he could quote them verbatim. He had secretly translated them into Vulcanur and had confessed to me that he planned to translate them into the highest form of Vulcan logic, Vulcanir, when he grew competent in that language. He had a print of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with their heretical explanation of logic, over his desk. Sarek had mounted a long, fruitless campaign against _Alice_, and with true Vulcan spirit, even though he had lost so far, was never willing to accept defeat.

"_Alice_ stays." I complained. "We get rid of _Alice_ when we get rid of me." That did shut Sarek up.

It also bothered Spock, who did not plan to lose _Alice_ over this. "_Alice in Wonderland_ is a good, **logical**, book," Spock said, striking his father further dumb at this sheer heresy. "But this is a **dangerous** sea."

I stepped impatiently into the breach. "What a pair of fraidy cats you two are. Get out from behind that bed, Spock. Now. We are going down to the beach. We took a beach house and we are using the beach."

"No," Spock refused. "I won't" He shut his eyes, presumably to block out even the sight of the sea through the long windows, and would have put his hands over his ears, but before he could do so, Sarek forestalled him.

"Do as your Mother instructs you." Sarek said.

Spock eyed Sarek, his usual court of last appeal, and got uncertainly to his feet. One the way out the patio door, Spock nearly turned tail and ran again, but Sarek took him firmly by the hand, something Vulcan parents did not generally do with children older than two or three. They stood there for a few moments, observing the surging and receding waves.

"Do you see?" Sarek said, almost gently. "It comes so far. And goes no farther."

"You might be more convincing if you didn't sound so scared yourself." I said, my arms folded as I watched them.

"We are Vulcans, Spock," Sarek said loftily, ignoring me. "Even an adult Vulcan requires a moment, or even several, to accustom himself to Terra's gigantic seas."

Spock looked at his father gratefully, hero worship in his eyes at allowing him that much license to be frightened.

"Earth. The name is Earth," I muttered. "Only non humans call it Terra."

"We are-" Sarek began.

"You know what? If I have to be a Vulcan on Vulcan, then you get to be humans on Terra."

Sarek and Spock looked one to the other askance.

"Illogical," Spock pronounced. And Sarek's shoulders dropped a fraction as if it was his son who had issued him a reprieve.

xxx

After a few days, Spock stopped flinching at every wave that came ashore. Sarek, Spock and I took long walks along the surf. Typical Vulcans, they fell to collecting and classifying shells and seaweeds, the flotsam and jetsam that the waves threw up on the beach. In a day or two Spock was jumping in the waves like any Terran kid to reach a treasured specimen, though he could never stay in for more than a few moments before coming out shivering with cold. We were the only vacationers who built fires on the beach for warmth in summer. Sarek and I roasted more than a few marshmallows over the coals. Spock, who had never developed a sweet tooth, turned up his Vulcan nose after the first one.

On one of our beach walks, Spock, who was a little ahead of Sarek and myself, was nearly brained by an incoming volleyball. He caught it instinctively, and then stood holding it, not knowing what to do.

"Hey!" A voice called from a knot of kids by a net. "Throw it back!"

Spock lobbed the ball into the air, sending it with Vulcan precision into the calling kid. When he'd stumbled back and caught it, after falling back into the sand from the force of it, he got up and regarded Spock with interest."

"Hey, kid! You wanna play?"

"Yeah, come on, we need another player!"

"My side, my side!"

Spock turned back to us inquisitively.

"Sure, why not, honey," I said. "Go have fun."

Spock took off on flying feet.

"Amanda. This is not what I would have intended Spock do here," Sarek said, moodily watching the volleyball game.

"What a powerful serve he has," I said admiringly. "Oh, Sarek. You can't expect him to stay in our exclusive company until we go back to Vulcan. He couldn't stand it. **You** couldn't stand it. You both need a break from each other."

"He will pick up…inappropriate behaviors."

I turned to Sarek, fixing him with a look. "Really? Such as ostracizing one of his peers because he is slightly different, which is the behavior his oh-so-Vulcan associates demonstrate on Vulcan?"

Sarek drew up at that. "I don't condone that behavior; it is more unVulcan than Spock's occasional lapses. But you know that Spock needs to master control, not lose it by emulating Terran associates."

"Such as his mother?"

"I did not mean you. I am particularly concerned about his having further setbacks. You know his bonding will come at the end of his seventh year. He must be ready, disciplined in mind and in emotions. I consider him far from that goal."

"I'm not keen on that bonding. But let's not fight about that now. I'm sure Spock will pick up some inappropriate behaviors, from a Vulcan perspective, while we are on Earth. And I know you mean well. I want Spock to be able to fit in on Vulcan too. But I also want him to be able to fit in on Earth. As you pointed out to him in Paris, Sarek, 'When in Rome' … "

"That was in an entirely different context."

"When we get back to Vulcan, you can go about correcting anything that is too objectionable. You always do. And for the most part, I do support you on that. But for now, I don't see how playing a little volleyball is going to corrupt his Vulcan soul."

"Do you think it is fair to Spock, to allow him so many contradictory standards? I do not."

"He's not going to turn human overnight, Sarek. " I tugged at his hand. "And perhaps he can learn something of human friendship, since on Vulcan close association seems to have been sadly lacking for him. Come on, let sit and wait for him."

"When he is bonded," Sarek said, staring out across the waves, "he will have all the emotional closeness he needs. That is part of the function of a marriage bond."

I squeezed his hand and laid my head on his shoulder. "Do you really think T'Pring can give that to him? I don't."

"Because you perceive she is outwardly cold. As most perceive me." He looked down at me. "You are aware there is a difference between outward behavior and the emotions all Vulcans conceal."

"If you say so, Sarek," I said, thinking of that cool precise little girl as I watched my sand covered son eagerly return a volley.

"And her control will be a good example for Spock," he added, mindful of my gaze.

"I'm not comfortable with the idea. I suppose in the end, it must be Spock's decision. Though I think it would be better to leave him free, as you were."

"It is because he has no close associations that I believe he does need an early bonding. It will…comfort him. In a purely Vulcan way. And it is ancient tradition. It is well for Spock to show he can follow all our ancient traditions."

"You want him to be you," I said. "I do too, of course. But what about that part of him that is me?"

"Amanda…" Sarek hesitated, then ventured. "Do you think embracing that will really serve him well, in the life he must come to lead? As my son and heir?"

"It will make his following your path more difficult."

"Precisely."

"I know that. But how can he deny who he is?"

"It is what Vulcans do every day, Amanda. The denial, the suppression of the true Vulcan nature is the most important part of modern Vulcan culture, the legacy from Surak that lifted us from wars and violence into the civilization you so admire. You must let Spock achieve that. And if he has to deny his mother's heritage and history, as well as his father's, then that is the price he must pay. As do all Vulcans."

I bit my lip, and blinked back my welling eyes, burying my face in Sarek's broad shoulder.

"Do not cry," Sarek said with equanimity, staring across the sea. "He can achieve it."

xxx

If Spock were going to achieve it, he was putting off the goal for a few weeks. Various sandy creatures began to bang on our screen door in the mornings, soliciting Spock for volleyball, for swimming in the surf, for other games.

True to his promise to me, Sarek held his council and said nothing, however much it cost him.

After a little tentativeness, understandable given the drubbing he often got from Vulcans his age, Spock grew comfortable in these associations. Fortunately the children were still small enough that the worst of human emotions, that of harassing any lack of conformity, wouldn't manifest for a few more years. These kids didn't regard his pointed ears as much more interesting than another associates slanted eyes. What they admired was his strength and skill with a ball, and that he could hold his breath underwater longer than any of them.

The first time Sarek discovered them at this latter game, he himself had charged into the surf, certain that his son had drowned. It gave all the kids a huge laugh, and Spock regarded his father's lapse of control with astonishment.

I began a small model in sand of the Fortress, my own personal sand castle. This proved an irresistible challenge to my Vulcans. They began their own replica, set prudently back from the waves so that even high tide could not damage it, rigorously reproduced to scale. Spock's little group of friends got roped into fetching and carrying for what largely became Sarek's creation, carried out under his direction. It became something people walked up to our section of the beach to see. This rather irritated Sarek who complained we had enough tourists plaguing the Fortress on Vulcan, without having to deal with them touring the model of it on Terra. But it also meant Sarek and I met our neighbors.

We went to a dinner party or two, and we gave some of our own.

After they finished their sandcastle, Sarek let the wind erode it. Spock found even the deterioration fascinating, and Sarek lectured him on how erosion affected the Fortress itself.

When we were surfeit of the beach, we began taking trips to show Spock Terra. I even relented and allowed a visit to the North African desert park, where a large tract of the original desert landscape had been preserved.

"Now **this** is a desert," Spock said, expressing the first real enthusiasm he had yet showed for anything of Terra. He turned to Sarek. "Why can't we live here?"

"Ask your mother," Sarek said, deadpan.

"It's a national park," I replied with excessive patience. "Anyway, don't I deal with enough deserts at home?" I asked, dashing two Vulcan hopes.

When Vulcans aim to do something, they do it thoroughly. Sarek had originally taken the villa for a month. That was ambitious for our disciplined family. After a week, where we all did nothing but play, Sarek set Spock to computer lessons for a couple of hours later in the day when his friends had gone off to their own dinners. And Sarek began to withdraw a little himself, spending the same time on his computer, dealing remotely with Federation and Vulcan affairs.

I got some requests for guest lectures, and even gave one at the Sorbonne. Sarek was not terribly sanguine about this.

"They're not going to rope me in, Sarek. It's not a convent and me a novice nun."

"I am sure they can offer nothing the Vulcan Science Academy cannot match," Sarek said darkly.

"I've never known the VSA to give the kind of wild faculty parties the Sorbonne staff gives," I teased. "Oh, don't look so morose. My two resident Vulcans give me all the wild life I can possibly stand."

I did turn down their job offer while I was there. I gave Sarek a copy of my letter turning it down when I got back.

"Regret," he read from it, turning the letter over in his hands. "I trust this is no more than the conventional formulaic 'regret' one puts in an invitation that one chooses to refuse."

"I won't lie to you. I do regret it, a little. But I know it is not practical. My job is portable. I can teach anywhere. But you can't be head of the Vulcan Council really anywhere but Vulcan. And we both agree Spock should grow up up on Vulcan, so that he can master your disciplines and learn to handle his hereditary responsibilities."

"But you prefer to teach at the Sorbonne? To live a less Vulcan dominate life?"

"At times that does appeal. I sometimes need a break too, my husband. Perhaps you will never understand me. But I want you to understand this, that I do choose you."

"I suppose I must be content with that," he said. Though I could tell he was far from contented.

He wandered over to Geneva and poked his nose into the Federation Council buildings. I wasn't sanguine about that, knowing there was every likelihood he'd get embroiled in some controversy. But somehow he resisted being drawn away to the ends of the galaxy. He had given up a great deal to arrange, and to keep us all on this hiatus from Vulcan duty.

After ten days I myself was becoming surfeit of vacation. After two weeks I think we were all, well, beginning to get a trifle bored.

"This has been a marvelous vacation. But I think it is time to relocate to Chez Vulcan," I told Sarek one evening.

He didn't quite believe me at first. "Are you quite sure?" he asked me, sparing me a glance from the cork he was easing out of a fine bottle of burgundy.

I sighed and looked around. We were in the kitchen, cooking. I had Child's unsurpassed ancient classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking open before me, for it seemed _di rigeur_ to eat French on the Cote d'Azur. A warm breeze stirred the white curtains, giving us a glimpse of the afternoon deepening in that lazy time between just before twilight. I had sand in my hair and crunching under my bare feet on the floor, for I'd been out in the waves earlier. So did Sarek, for he had just chased Spock in to his lessons from an afternoon on the beach.

I could hear the faint sound of my son's voice at Sarek's desk as he settled into verbal correspondence, via subspace, with his tutor on Vulcan.

"I've had a fabulous time. We all have, haven't we? There's almost nothing I'd like better than to spend another two weeks, or even forever here. But like all vacations are, it's just a fantasy existence. We both know that. We're just…treading water here. Don't you think it's time to go home and get on with our real lives?"

The cork came out of the bottle with a subdued pop. Sarek put bottle and cork down with controlled precision and turned to me with a narrowed, evaluative look that dissected me from salty head to sandy toe.

"What?" I asked.

"You are quite beautiful," he said.

I let out the breath I'd held in wondering what he was going to say. "Honestly, Sarek," I complained. "It would spare my heart a little if you could somehow coordinate your expression to your emotions, or at least to your thoughts."

"I refuse to acknowledge that I had any expression at all, far less any emotion."

I turned away, took the bottle of burgundy. Added a splash of it to the dish, which rose up in a wine redolent steam. Reduced the heat.

"Then what was that statement you just made?"

"An esoteric evaluation."

"Cute. But not very honest." I shook my head. "I know you love me, whether you say it or not. I think you've done your best to give me a great vacation, and I thank you for it." I met his eyes. "But I also think that we haven't settled anything. We can't avoid it forever. Isn't it time we did?"

He met my eyes with no emotion. "There is nothing to settle. We agreed to a visit to Terra to settle your…emotional longing. If that has been accomplished, then yes, I agree it is time for us to leave."

"No. I agreed to this vacation because I thought **you** needed this as much as me. What happened between us, since I chose to go to that conference, was something **you** had real trouble dealing with. I think you still do. You lost it, Sarek. Spock lost it too. Though, I wonder how much of that bled from you. And we've done nothing whatsoever to resolve that."

"Vulcan bondmates do not separate."

"All right, so that part, our separating even for me to go to a conference, was a failed experiment. That doesn't address the rest. I accept Vulcan nature. You could have told me about it from the first, and I think I still might have accepted it. We can agree not to part, or to do so with a lot more discussion and consideration. But I can't change how I feel and think and that also seems to be an issue. The question is, can you accept that aspect of my humanity?"

Sarek looked away. "Amanda. You ask too much."

The pan sputtered. The wine reduction had reduced until the mushrooms were beginning to smoke. I swore and pulled the pan off the fire. "Darn. That's ruined."

"It doesn't matter. We'll go out to eat."

"I don't give a damn about dinner." I faced him. "Sarek, all I'm asking is that you be honest with me. If you can't accept my feelings, my mindset, then you have to at least acknowledge that it is something human that can't change. And address how this affects you. We have to deal with it. A vacation isn't going to ever change that. I think I hurt you. I'm sorry for that, but you have to …get over it, because I can't change any more than you can. We haven't talked about that at all."

"Honest," he said. "I cannot be honest about this. Vulcans – no Vulcan – is honest about such …feelings. They are controlled. Denied. Buried. Eliminated. They are made not to exist. How can I acknowledge them to you, when I do not admit them in myself?"

"But they are there, between us. They separate us more than any mere conference, more than any physical separation could do. Yes, you've gotten your control back. For now. But these…emotions… they rise up, and cause these issues between us. I don't see how you can not acknowledge them, to yourself and to me, and figure out how to deal with them."

"That is all the more reason why I cannot, Amanda."

I shook my head. "But where does that leave us?"

"It leaves you married to a Vulcan," Sarek said.

"And you to a human," I countered.

He looked at me for a long, long moment. "I suppose if we are in concurrence on that, then it is time we went home."

I turned away, frustrated. Scraped at the burned mushrooms and then tossed the pan and its contents in the recycler. "I'm not entirely happy about how this has turned out," I said, watching the lights flicker as the machine reduced pan and contents to their essential atoms. "I still think this is going to rise up and bite us in the future." I looked at Sarek. "How can it not?"

"Vulcan control will answer for it."

"It doesn't seem to me that Vulcan control is inviolate."

"That is precisely why I must strive to ensure that it is. And train Spock accordingly."

Spock came to the kitchen door.

"Is there a fire?" he asked. "Something is burning."

"Something was burning," I corrected him, giving his father a meaningful look.

"But we have put the fire out," Sarek concluded.

"Perhaps only for the present," I added gloomily, not at all convinced of that.

All these existential fires meant nothing to our son.

"When's dinner?" Spock wanted to know.

"Tonight it will be delayed. Tomorrow, it will be on Vulcan," Sarek said.

I folded my arms, leaned against the counter, and threw in the proverbial human towel, while my son, showing the results of two weeks in the company of Terran children, gave a restrained but still expressive cheer.

_To be continued…._


	11. Chapter 11

**Small Talk**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Epilogue**

It had been an odd sort of full circle, from Vulcan to Rigel to Terra's south of France back to Vulcan. My simple little five day conference had turned into quite a trip. Still, I returned to Vulcan. I didn't get lost, nor be captured by Orion Pirates, nor even waltz off into the sunset with a dashing young human. I never even ate a hamburger. I wasn't entirely sure I had settled the issues my trip had raised between Sarek and myself. It would seem Sarek, being Vulcan, was either unable to deal with them, and I, being human, was unable to change. But for the moment, we were at least resolved to keep on trying even in the face of all this: our lack of understanding, and our lack of ability to change our essential natures.

But as Sarek piloted the aircar to a gentle descent down to the red sands of the Fortress, I breathed a sigh of relief. Vacations were all very well, but it was awfully nice to be back home. Behind us in the cargo area, Spock was bouncing up and down with the energy of a beach ball, for all the world like a kid who had forgotten to perform a certain basic function before he left the star terminal.

With a level of control admirable even in a Vulcan who had just had a lengthy vacation, Sarek refrained from correcting him.

"We'll be inside in a minute," I said.

"It's not that," Spock said bouncing back up to see something above his circumscribed field of vision. "Who are they?" he pointed a finger.

Behind the force shield, lined up in rows on the desert sands, were rows and rows and rows of Federation news service personnel, waving recorders.

Sarek looked at them, and his face shadowed. "Wait here," he cautioned, and slid out of the car.

"Sarek?" I turned in my seat.

A roar went up from the crowd of reporters, cries of "Ambassador". I instinctively rose a little to get a better look.

"Wait," Sarek repeated.

"What is it?" Spock asked, beginning to look a little frightened.

I looked at Spock, who was frowning at the banked reporters, his eyes wide, fingers clenched on the seat as he watched his father approach that mob alone. I regretted him seeing this. Sarek and I had both tried to shelter Spock as much as possible from these aspects of his father's profession. "It's nothing, honey. They must want a comment from your father on something that has happened in the Federation."

Spock eyed the massed crowd. "It must be something big. Perhaps we have gone to war?"

"Bite your tongue," I said, wincing. "It couldn't be that. There was nothing like that when we left Terra."

"I thought you wanted us to call it Earth."

"I'm back on Vulcan now," I said, amused myself at how my own mind had shifted gears.

"Why bite my tongue?"

"It's just… Never mind."

"I already did. It hurt."

"It's an expression that means don't suggest such a horrible thing."

Sarek finished conferring with the guards and came back. "Let us go into the house. Quickly. You may run, Spock."

Cooped up in the _Surak_ as he had been, Spock didn't wait for a second invitation to stretch his legs, or break from the usual sedate control that Sarek generally imposed on him on Vulcan. Perhaps his near vacation from Vulcan control was not entirely over, after all. He took off on flying feet.

"Come," Sarek said. "No, leave everything. The guard will bring in the luggage."

"What is it?" I asked, anxiously. "Is it a war?" The reporters roared again, this time yelling my name as I got out of the aircar.

"Dr. Grayson! Dr. Grayson!"

"No, not a war," Sarek said. He put an arm around me, a rare gesture in public, done for protection and urged me through the sweep gates, through the garden, and into the house.

"What's going on?" I asked as we walked into the great hall. "What has happened?"

Sarek didn't answer immediately. Then said, "The guard reports that a priority packet has been delivered for you."

"A packet?" I relaxed and my shoulders dropped. "Well, that doesn't seem too drastic." I fanned myself a little, amazed at how hot Vulcan could seem after only a few weeks away. "What's the big deal about a packet?"

Sarek frowned, but before he could speak, Spock returned, having shed his Earth garments for light Vulcan clothes. "I'm hungry."

I drew a deep breath, feeling a little lightheaded. Already the dry, oxygen starved air of Vulcan was getting to me. And the heavy gravity. "Yes, of course. I think I need a drink of water myself. And to take some triox." Spock and I headed for the kitchen. The new kitchen. I had forgotten about what happened to the old one until now. Sarek must have described it in some detail. It was a fair match, though some of the colors and designs had suffered a little in translation from my originals, to Sarek's perception of them, to his descriptions communicated to our Vulcan contractor. The designs had a decidedly more Vulcan flair than they had before, the colors slightly skewed from what a human eye would have seen. But it was still recognizably my kitchen.

"Oh, it's beautiful," I said. I fixed Spock with a look. "Not that this excuses what you did."

Spock just gave me an overly patient look as if to say that a crime so old was surely past the statute of limitations.

I suspected I'd have to resort to the food processor since there was nothing gathered or picked, but then I remembered all those meals I'd prepared. Spock trail of destruction had not reached the items left waiting in stasis, so we had a choice of several different meals. I pulled a few out and set the table. I poured Spock a glass of juice and myself a glass of water. I took a triox pill.

Sarek came back in, a package in his hand. I thought it was the usual diplomatic packet, but he handed it to me. "It's from Stockholm," he said.

Spock's already sharp ears, if possible, pricked even more. "I thought Mother was a Nobel loser?"

"Smile when you say that, buster," I warned him.

"Spock," Sarek adjured, as Spock drew a deep breath, prepared to repeat his assertion with a maniac grin.

I could see Spock was going to take a little while to settle down from vacation.

Eyeing his father, Spock deflated.

"Weren't we supposed to leave him behind on Earth?" I asked my husband, opening one of the many seals.

Spock scowled.

"Control," Sarek said to his son.

"But she **was** a Nobel loser," Spock insisted.

"Spock," Sarek repeated again, raising a brow.

Spock fought his face back to Vulcan calm, while still sitting on the edge of his seat as I fumbled with seals and thumbprints. "Well?" he asked, "Well?"

"Apparently, not any more," I said, reading. "Xhantu's research was proven to be-" I hesitated, glanced at my son, eagerly listening, and put my hands over both his ears. "Fraudulent," I whispered to Sarek, _sotto voice_. "He was caught **doctoring** his results."

"I heard that," Spock said, shaking free of my grasp. "He **cheated**."

"Let that be a lesson to **you**, then," I said.

"I never cheat," Spock said, drawing himself up in outrage.

"No, but you have other interesting talents," I said, "Just remember, crime does not pay."

"It would have for Xhantu though, if he hadn't gotten caught," Spock said sagely. "The Nobel has a **big** prize. I read about it when you lost. A million Federation credits."

"I don't really characterize it as **losing** to come in second for a Nobel," I said, slightly nettled. "It was still a great honor. I just didn't win'"

"That is illogical. It is a binary function. One either wins or loses," Spock said. "And you lost."

"My loving son," I said.

"Regardless of whether Xhantu was detected or not," Sarek intoned in the voice of sweet Vulcan reason. "There is no honor in a fraudulent award."

"Yes, father," Spock echoed in the same overly pious Vulcan manner. Then he turned back to me. "So now you get the big prize?" he asked eagerly "All of the credits?"

"Um," I said, looking through the packet. "Yes, I guess I do. That's what it says." I fixed him with a look. "And it might **just** pay for the kitchen renovations," I added pointedly.

"It was an accident," Spock said, sitting back in his chair, scowling again. "Anyway, I had to do something to bring you home."

Sarek eyed him, as if debating whether to chastise him one more for emotionalism. Then tilting his head in a Vulcan shrug, he sat down at the new table. He raised a brow and ran a finger across the top, nodding at the smooth finish. "Satisfactory," he said. He gave his son a pointed glance, and self conscious, Spock squirmed in his newly purchased, unburned seat.

"Amanda. This is the official notification that you have won the Nobel?" Sarek asked, eyeing the packet.

I handed the papers to him "Looks like it. I suppose I should be really happy." I shrugged. "But having lost it to begin with and after all that has happened since," I eyed Sarek thinking that I knew a lot less than I had ever suspected about my own little Vulcan/human family, much less Federation aliens as a whole, "it doesn't really feel like much of a win. It's not the same."

Having read through the papers himself, Sarek set them back down. "Feelings aside, you have done so. You will have to say something to the press about the Committee's decision. The controversy surrounding this-" he glanced at Spock, "fraud seems to have whetted their interest."

"Nothing like a good controversy to peak the Press' curiosity."

"That is no doubt why they are standing out there in the sun. You should relieve them."

"I just got home," I complained. "Can't you do something about them for now? Move back the perimeter? Anyway, the press almost never cares about these academic prizes. They are just interested in the scandal."

"I will certainly move the perimeter. But first you must speak to them. Then we can order them to leave, and reset the boundaries until this dies down."

"Can I at least finish going through all this stuff so I know what I'm talking about?" I complained. I opened up another stiff packet, which turned out to contain an offer for the new Nobel winner to keynote at the Interstellar Federation Ethology conference, the flagship of all conferences for my profession. It included a first class Starship ticket, and a voucher for all expenses. "Oh, my," I said, staring at it.

"You're not going away?" Spock asked, eyeing the documents, rapidly losing what little Vulcan control he had remastered. "You're not going away and leaving us? Not again!" He turned to Sarek. "Are you going to let her go?"

"Haven't I heard this somewhere before?" I asked the room bemusedly.

"Spock," Sarek reproved.

Sarek had picked up the invitation, turning it over in his hands, still Vulcan steady even in the face of potential future disaster. But in spite of not losing his countenance, as his son had, he seemed to have turned two shades paler.

"It is the primary conference in your field," Sarek noted evenly, leaving me an opening.

"It is," I said. I looked up, meeting two sets of Vulcan eyes, anxiously waiting.

"I completely understand why you would wish to attend," Sarek said, again without the slightest expression. "In fact, I believe you should. Spock and I will stay home. We will be perfectly fine."

"No!" Spock said.

"Child," Sarek said. "That is quite enough. I believe it is past time for you to reacquaint yourself with the disciplines. This is not Terra."

"She can't go alone."

"I certainly can go alone," I said, feeling as if I had really come full circle. "And I don't want you to ever repeat the kind of behavior you displayed while I was gone. I don't want to hear about you ever attempting to steal a starship again, either," I said. "Or not until you are at least thirty and your father and I are no longer responsible for your crimes. Yes, crimes."

"But I had to rescue you!" Spock said.

"Spock," Sarek warned.

"Everyone can calm down," I said. "I only said I certainly could go alone. But I am not going alone," I took the documents back from Sarek. "I am not going at all."

"Amanda…." Sarek drew a careful breath. "It will be all right."

"It won't," Spock muttered.

"Thank you. But no," I said. "I don't want to. Frankly, the thought of going to another conference right now…well, it just wears me out."

Spock cheered.

"Spock, that is quite enough," Sarek said sternly. "This is not Terra, and we are not your wild Terran friends. You will control yourself."

"**You're** part of the reason the thought wears me out," I said to my son, who stared back at me, coolly unrepentant. "But," I drew a deep breath, "I also have had enough conference for awhile. I don't think I can handle any more…small talk," I added, eyeing my husband, who looked away briefly. "And in spite of this Nobel, I am feeling very unqualified. Regardless, I am going to claim a prior commitment. They didn't want me before, so they can just whistle for me now," I concluded.

"Sounds do not travel through the vacuum of space," Spock loftily informed me.

"Thank you for the information. But I – we – are not going."

"Good," Spock said. "Because if Mother keeps going to conferences, we'll keep having to go on vacations."

I grinned over my son's head at my husband. "Didn't you like Earth, Spock?"

"Terra is interesting and -" he eyed his father cautiously, "fun. But Vulcan is home."

Even across the table as he was, I could feel Sarek relax, just fractionally, in relief at his son's statement.

"My thoughts exactly," I said meeting my husband's eyes. He carefully retained his non-committal expression. Though he seemed to have regained his color.

"I suppose I have to say something to that crowd of jackdaws now. You'll come with me, won't you, Sarek?"

"Let us hope they will lose interest with a statement." Sarek said, rising. "Otherwise we will have to increase security until the controversy dies down."

"My making very little of this should help that."

"Yes," Sarek fixed Spock with a glance, "You will stay here. You will refrain from volunteering any comments to the Press, regardless of what you are asked. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Spock said.

"Since the main Nobel ceremony is already passed," I said to Sarek as we walked out the door, "I think they will not be too disappointed if I refuse to attend any formalities. It is a shame we didn't hear about this before we left Earth. You don't mind, do you?"

"At the risk of repeating what our child said," Sarek intoned, handing me up to the guard lookout, and making sure we were well out of Spock's hearing. "Yay."

xxx

Left alone in the shining new kitchen Spock looked around speculatively, and sighed for lost opportunities. Then he picked up the packet with the conference invitation and ticket, and surreptitiously chucked it in the brand new recycler, just as outside, the assembled press let out a roar again as his parents again came into view.

_Fini_

**Small Talk**

**A Holo series Novella**

**By **

**Pat Foley**

**March 2011**

_Author's notes:_

_Spock, of course, did steal two starships in his thirties, one for Chris Pike and one for himself, in Amok Time, though we have no evidence that he stole any more prior to that._

_Sarek, of course, never quite cured himself of the habit of keeping unpleasant secrets from and engaging in lies of omission with his wife, as we discovered when he concealed his heart condition in Journey to Babel._

_Perhaps irritated that she didn't come to Stockholm for the ceremony, the Nobel Committee never did award Amanda another prize, though she did pick up a third Zi. _

_Concerned for his son's future, Sarek continued to stress the importance of Spock's suppression of emotion and adoption of the Vulcan way. Amanda thought her son should have the option of private expression of emotions, much as his father did, while Sarek contended such was suitable only after adulthood, when control had been fully mastered. That disagreement, coupled with Sarek's bonding of Spock to a girl, T'Pring, whom Amanda did not think was suitable for Spock, created conflict between Sarek and Amanda. Their actions during this period threaten Spock, who just as any small child would, only wants his parents to remain together. When their conflicts become so great Spock believes Amanda might take him to Earth and leave his father, Spock checkmates her by claiming he wants to fully adopt the Vulcan way and all the strictest of Vulcan disciplines. It keeps him and Amanda on Vulcan. She doesn't contest his choice, though she does not entirely believe it. For the moment, though, it appears as if Sarek was right all along as to Spock's true nature. _

_But Spock has also come to realize he is a source of contention between his parents. As a bonded Vulcan male himself, he believes he has no right to threaten his father's bond with his mother. On the other hand, he also is his mother's son and wishes to explore that side of his heritage. His only solution, he believes, is to wait until he finishes the education his father has set out for him, and then make his own way, removing himself as a source of conflict for his parents. _

_Amanda was perfectly correct that Sarek's suppression of his unease with her less than Vulcan attitudes regarding marriage, compounded by their arguments over Spock, would eventually return larger than ever as most repressed conflicts do. Amanda cannot help being human. But for a Vulcan with a fatal mating cycle and no prospect for divorce but the Challenge, her attitudes are extremely difficult for any Vulcan bondmate to handle. Over the years, Sarek struggles to master his own purely Vulcan and emotional reaction to her perceived rejections, though Amanda perceives them as ordinary disagreements._

_This events and decisions in this next Holo novel sets up the attitudes and conflicts that preview the novel Holography 1: The Catalyst that result in Spock leaving for Starfleet, and Sarek falling into crisis, and as a result maintaining the 18 year breach with his son. The latter is not fully resolved until the aftermath of Sarek's heart operation in Journey to Babel. After the constant strain of emotional control over his issues with Spock and Amanda has shattered Sarek's heart, he becomes more accepting of Spock's choices. While he and Amanda are still two species who can't entirely change, Sarek seeks to conceal less from Amanda, even though it had always been done to protect her. And with the conflict between Sarek and Spock at least partially resolved, she has less to 'challenge' Sarek with, which means he has less to deal with. _

_It can't be expected that a family so strong willed, opinionated and diverse never has any differences. But they have learned and grown enough to handle them not as a conflict between human and Vulcan, but as a compromise. Which was what Sarek and Amanda had originally set out to do. _

_Amanda should have won a Nobel for this alone. But she was well satisfied with her husband's and son's healed hearts._

_Small Talk copyright Pat Foley March 2011_


End file.
